


Simpson's Sky

by Adrenalineshots



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Episode Tag, Episode: s04e17 It's a Terrible Life, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-21
Updated: 2010-05-21
Packaged: 2017-10-09 15:27:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 30,833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/88875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Adrenalineshots/pseuds/Adrenalineshots
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean has become a target for more than one group and now it's up to Sam to prevent all parties from hitting their mark. He didn't had a very good start. Language and mature themes, as always. Dean whump at large.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Simpson's Sky

Dean liked to watch the Simpsons. Whenever they stopped at some crappy motel, if he could find an episode in between hunts, he still watched and laughed.

Today there was a Simpsons kind of sky above. You know the type, with the deep blue sky and the perfectly painted fluffy white clouds. Perfectly defined and flat against the big canvas like they had been hand drawn.

Any other day, and such a perfect sky would've gone unnoticed and unmentioned. But not today.

Because today… today he had a clear view of that same lovely sky. In fact, the sky was all he could see when he looked down; its pristine beauty so incongruous to the utter shit he was in.

It was also a good way to forget why he was currently hanging upside down from an abandoned train bridge, naked, in the middle of Out-There, Ohio, on a Spring day that was so cold that it could still be called Winter, freezing to death.

Ok… maybe that was being a bit overly dramatic. Dean knew there was little chance of him actually freezing to death. No, the people who had dropped him off the bridge without the benefit of an elastic bungee rope, effectively breaking his left leg in the process, would probably finish him off long before he had time to freeze to death.

So, things were looking up already. Actually, he could only look up, because the one time that Dean had tried to look in the opposite direction, he had almost ended up losing the rest of the meal that had gotten him in trouble in the first place.

"Just say the word, Winchester, and this could all be over."

Dean forced himself to not twist his head or make any special effort to look at the guy who had spoken. It hurt to even turn his eyeballs, never mind the whole set of face and head. Besides, there was no point in doing that. He already knew what the man looked like and he wasn't exactly what you might call an entertaining view.

The speaker, coincidentally the largest of his captors, stalked angrily toward him. The older Winchester judged the brute to be of Mexican origin, if the dark hair, tan skin and the slightly oval eyes were anything to go by. Dean figured that he didn't looked like an Eeny at all... Pepe was a much better name for him, in honor of that one time he'd eaten in the restaurant by the same name and had gotten himself a stomach ache over bad burritos. This Pepe had upset his stomach too, but instead of burritos, he'd use his fists.

Pepe drew closer, all sweat stained underarms, annoying bulk, and if that weren't enough, from Dean's current vantage point, he could too easily see the man's over-grown nose hairs. Stopping nauseatingly close to Dean's face, he grabbed Dean's hair in one meaty palm and twisted, forcing Dean to look at him, leaning in until his stubble-covered chin and fetid breath were just inches from Dean's nose. Dean tried to keep his gag reflex in check because otherwise he was going to hurl.

Could it still be called throwing up when you're hanging upside down? Either way, Dean could guess that it wouldn't be pleasant.

"Look at me when I talk to you, boy."

"Which word do you prefer?" Dean finally asked, his voice sounding higher and wrong as he tried to talk through the pain and the rush of blood to his head. "I got asshole and fuckwad, all up for gra-…oof!"

Dean knew that he really shouldn't smart-mouth the guy that was currently in the privileged position of improving his situation or make it much, much worse. But he couldn't help it.

The beefy hand that slammed against his cheek brought the ringing bells back to his ears, as Dean's body swung sickly around with the force of the punch.

Turns out that throwing up when you're hanging upside down is twice as nasty as the regular thing.

..................................

 

Sam was blaming it on the shock. Or maybe on the fact that he had been completely overwhelmed. With all that had been dumped on their heads over the last couple of weeks, it certainly made sense. Or maybe it was the healthy food.

Yeah… Sam was definitely blaming it on the healthy food.

You see, this whole mess had all started in the first place because Dean had been hungry. And while that wasn't especially news for Dean, hunger had recently taken on a whole new meaning when someone like Dean, who –unlike other human beings- actually needs his greasy food to survive, is subjected to a diet consisting of nothing but grilled tofu, lettuce salads and some detox drink that looked too much like watered-down piss for comfort.

All for the sake of some 'lesson' that Castiel's boss had deemed necessary.

Sam gripped the car wheel a little bit tighter, imagining it was the new angel's neck. Better to blame healthy food rather than Heaven, he'd always say, especially if you have demon blood in you.

Not that there wasn't plenty of blame to pass around, particularly to Heaven's emissaries.

So there he was, Sam Wesson, still ridding the coals of his epic resignation, when the world had literally shifted and dimmed around him. Suddenly, Sam Wesson was Sam Winchester and suddenly, smashing a phone was hardly the most noticeable thing he'd ever done in his life.

Dean had showed up not five minutes after that revelation, dragging him away with a pissy attitude and muttering about junkless dicks and how hungry he was.

They found the car with all their stuff inside. It was exactly where the latest angel-dick had said it would be; in the relative safety of an abandoned garage near the office building, fourth level, an important piece of information that had been shared as Dean stormed onto the elevator, ripping angrily at his tie and suspenders. Walking in his brother's coals, Sam could only follow and hear him muttering about the dimwit that had come up with the ridiculous idea that elastic pieces of crap were a good way to keep your pants up.

After a good twenty minute check of his baby, and a more clandestine inspection of the trunk contents, to determine no permanent damage had been done to the Impala, Dean finally climbed inside and started the engine, seeming to relax somewhat as he heard the familiar purr.

Seething in cooler anger, he stared straight-ahead, all the while ignoring Sam's pleas and slow burn of lost patience over finding out what the hell had just happened and why the fuck had it happened in the first place.

It wasn't until they were well out of the city's limits that Dean begun to talk, albeit in half cryptic, half rant, somewhat resembling answers. It came out of his clenched teeth, sounding more like muttered grunts peppered with individual words like "fucking dicks" and "mind fuckers" and "fucking hungry".

Fuck appeared to be Dean's operative word for the whole experience and everyone involved.

It took Sam a while to realize that the junkless dicks that Dean had been going on and on about were actually the late Uriel, Castiel and his boss, Zachariah.

Judging by the thunderous look on his brother's face, details would not be forthcoming until after their search to find the greasiest place they could see. Or smell.

Over the most disgusting display of beef juice and bacon grease to ever ooze off the sides of a burger, Sam listened patiently and with growing contempt. According to his brother, Heaven had decided to put them in alternative life styles, just to see how they handled a haunting without benefit of their know-how and experience. Not caring about how many victims were lost in the mean time, not caring about Dean or Sam's willingness, and particularly, not caring about Dean's dislike of ties and salads. And fucking suspenders.

God's own way of making them bark like chickens, Sam guessed.

It took Sam longer to pry out of Dean the reason why the ang... er... junkless dicks, had forced them into such a position. After a deep breath, the older Winchester related Alistair's revelations and the real reason why Lilith wanted him in Hell. That was when Dean lost his appetite and pushed aside the remains of the third burger that he had been wolfing down, all the while avoiding Sam's gaze as he tried to digest the fact that his brother had actually been the one to break the first seal.

Turns out Dean's capitulation to his meal was too little, too late, judging by the repercussions of those first two and a half burgers.

An interesting piece of trivia that Sam suspected and Dean had no idea about until he experienced it first hand: when your stomach spends three weeks digesting nothing but non-greasy, non-fried, nearly vegan type food? It actually rebels against the sudden re-introduction of said grease, meat, deep-fried, high fat and otherwise disgusting food.

Case in point, thirty minutes after hitting the road, the 'food' that had gone in, was desperately looking for a place to be let out. The middle of no-where gas station they came upon, complete with the handy, easily visible restroom sign, seemed heaven sent at the time.

After all that had happened recently, they should've been wearier of that.

Twenty minutes after watching Dean race to the bathroom door, looking like he was on the verge of giving birth, Sam started to wonder if everything was alright. Granted, he had spent those twenty minutes going over everything that was not alright in their existence, starting with his self imposed demon-blood diet and Dean's new position as both Heaven's and Hell's bulls-eye.

Because neither had mentioned it, but both were very much aware that, between Uriel's failed plan of taking Dean out using Alistair and all the trouble that Zachariah had gone through to change Dean's mind, it was pretty clear that Dean wasn't as replaceable or unimportant to the game as the traitor angel and all the demons had lead them to believe before.

Suddenly feeling the weight that rested on his brother's shoulders, Sam was more than a little ticked at the amount of time Dean was taking in the bathroom and decided to check for himself.

"Dean?" With no answer to his careful call and accompanying knocks, Sam took a deep breath and turned the door handle. After having more than one experience with the consequences of bad food, both on his and Dean's digestive system, Sam released his breath through his mouth and peeked around the grimy door. The room was empty.

So, yeah… Sam was definitely blaming it on the healthy food. Because otherwise he would have to blame himself.

.........................

It was one of those unwritten rules that pretty much everyone obliges because, seriously, some things you just don't do.

Like, you don't hit on your best friend's girl, not even if she's extremely hot and hitting on you; or take advantage of someone's handicap, unless you really, really need to; or you don't put itchy powder on your brother's underwear unless he's messed with your car… likewise, you don't attack a man when his pants are down. Literally.

Half way through his second burger, Dean knew that this would not end well. The funny noises his stomach started making, accompanied by the fact that he could sort of feel the weight of the greasy food sinking deeper and deeper inside of him, were all well known warning signs. Still, he gave it no thought, because his taste buds demanded compensation for the weeks of sensory deprivation, and he forged ahead. The return of the salty, meaty, pickle-ridden juice inside his mouth, that right there… was heaven!

Even when Sam turned the conversation toward things that he really wasn't ready to talk about, Dean still tried to force his mouth to work through both undercooked meat and hard words. That didn't last long, but at least the lack of further appetite gave him a good excuse to abandon the roadside restaurant and hit the road once again.

He had missed the road.

Three weeks of nothing but a mechanical, drone-driven life, a posh apartment and totally douche office –his office, for Christ-sake!– and Dean was more than ready to go from Ohio to Sacramento in one go. Back in his car. A real car. Not that lame excuse for a machine Prius.

A fucking, tree-hugging Prius! The thought alone made him want to just turn around and go back to smash in that car's toy-engine.

But the toy-car wasn't the problem. The problem wasn't even the boring, normal life that had been shoved down their throats with oh!so much care for the past weeks. The problem was everything that had happened before, what Dean had learned about himself and the unchangeable facts about his future.  
Dean, savior of all mankind. It sounded wrong on so, so many levels... Sacramento wasn't nearly far enough.

They needed a lot more miles between this and them. So many more that Dean was even willing to get on a plane and just put whatever distance he could between them and this whole mess. They could move to the North Pole… or Finland… maybe Russia. Any place as far from the south as they could get. Any place cold enough to dissuade the demons from going after them and icy enough to freeze the angels' wings before they could reach them.

But he knew he was only fooling himself. Zachariah's little stunt, if anything, had proven to him that he couldn't escape this. Fate was a vicious bitch and, for better or for worse, he and Sam were stuck with their own destinies and nothing they did or could do would ever put a dent in that.

Speaking of dent…

Dean held the steering wheel with one hand while the other cradled his stomach. Underneath the skin, he could feel his guts undulating and doing the hula-hula around his last meal. That couldn't be good.

The sight of the of the middle of no-where gas station with the huge sign announcing 'restroom' in a lovely shade of red paint in the otherwise white wall, was like a stripper's bar in the middle of an Amish county.

Before Sam could ask what he was doing, Dean had already turned the car around and parked outside the fuelling area.

"Be right back," Dean threw back at his brother, hurriedly making a mad dash for the bathroom. Lord, that door had better be unlocked.

And if he was walking kind of funny and his ass was clenching harder than it should, it was only because Dean was too cool of a guy to actually run to the bathroom. And because all of his concentration was focused on his mind-over-matter issues of not crapping himself silly on the way to the john, Dean completely failed to notice the group of people coming out of the gas station. The group that was watching him with too much glee on their faces to be good.

Yup, he was totally blaming this on the healthy food.

Because otherwise, how else would Dean Winchester, savior of all mankind, ever be caught with his pants down, in a gas station bathroom, making weird faces and even weirder noises and taken so completely off guard that when the two men crashed through his stall he was too stunned to do anything but look surprised and allow himself to be knocked unconscious?

Healthy food sucked.

................

Sam was not surprised to see the utterly disastrous condition of the now empty public bathroom. Having been attacked in one himself, not that long ago, by a very pissed, and very dead Henriksen, Sam was well aware of how horribly bad a close-quarters fight in a place like that could go.

Unlike him, however, Dean's attackers seemed to have been more of the human variety rather than the supernatural. The air in there smelled of many things that Sam would've rather never smelled in his life, but sulphur wasn't one of them, which pretty much excluded demons as the culprits, and ghosts didn't leave size fourteen footprints in crashed bathroom stalls.

The very stall, Sam was realizing, with the still fresh bloodstain on the water deposit. The younger Winchester swallowed hard at the fear threatening to strangle him. Fear and anger.

Who the hell attacks a guy in a bathroom stall? It's just wrong!

There were other footprints in the room, a couple that Sam would swear to be a bit too small for a men's bathroom, but given the place, it was impossible for him to figure which of those belonged to the people who had taken Dean and which belonged to people just going in there to relieve themselves. Or, you know... whatever else.

Sam stepped outside, looking at his deserted surroundings. There were no surveillance cameras outside, none that he could see in the gas station itself.

In his mind, Sam went over all the cars that he had lazily watched earlier come and go as he waited for Dean. One of them had left carrying his brother against his will and Sam's mind had been so deeply sunken in misery and self-commiseration that he had failed to notice.

Trying really hard not to panic, Sam went inside the gas station. The half asleep guy at the counter hardly knew which day of the week it was, let alone if he'd seen a tall man (wearing a size fourteen he had to be either tall or a really short Bigfoot) dragging someone from the bathroom. Sam asked anyway, just in case he was making the wrong assumptions about this guy, holding out hope that the goopy eyes staring back at him weren't connected to an equally goopy brain.

The cashier, maybe around forty going on eighty-five, turned crusty eyes on the stranger and shrugged. "It's a public bathroom dude," he simply said, like that explained everything.

That statement gave Sam a pretty good idea of the weird stuff that the cashier had probably seen going in or coming out of there. One man dragging another wouldn't even reach the top ten.

"Think. Harder," he insisted, using his bigger frame to lean in and asphyxiate the other man's personal space with the sheer volume of his presence. "It's a slow day… there can't have been that many people going through here today."

The guy gulped down his growing fear, probably thinking that yesterday would've been a good day to quite that shitty job, and scratched his too long hair. "Well, there were a couple of guys in here, earlier… hum… two guys and a chick."

"Go on," Sam urged, taking a half-step back. A small reward for the man's new found memories and an encouragement for him to keep going. "What about them?"

"They… they were acting kind of funny, cruising the shelves but not really buying anything, you know?"

Waiting… biding their time. Waiting for them. Waiting for Dean.

Sam nodded. He knew exactly what he meant.

His looming presence became more friendly than intimidating, him and the cashier, just like two buddies, chatting about the weather. "What did they look like?"

Another shrug, this time an honest one and not a sign of dismissal as before. They had been just a couple more customers, bad ones at that. At the time, the cashier had only paid attention to any pocketing of merchandise or sign that they were there to rob the place. "The gal was kind of hot; you know, in that backwater, white trash, hillbilly kind of way. A bottle red-head."

"You didn't happen to notice what they were driving, did you?"

.........................

It was an earthquake.

Or maybe a really wild horse.

Dean couldn't quite decide which one. Whatever it was, it kept jarring his aching head in a way that, were it not to stop really soon, everything he'd eaten in the past couple of months would be making an appearance shortly.

"Hey, look! He's awake!" Someone blared way too near his ears.

Two sharp and loud taps of hand on metal and the earthquake stopped. As did the engine that was causing it. Come to think of it, maybe he was just in a car.

Dean opened his eyes. Nothing but clear blue sky above.

"Get up!" A different voice, a female voice, said this time. The vicious kick to his left shin was a lot more convincing than the words had been.

Dean gasped and looked around him, fumbling to push himself upright. Placing one hand down, the other followed unintentionally and he stopped, staring dazedly at his hands, mind still fuzzy. Took him a moment to realize the reason why his hands were working as one was because his wrists were trapped in cold metal cuffs. "What... t'fuck?"

Gazing at his surroundings, he noticed more metal in the form of low metal walls, painted black. Some kind of pickup truck, the opened back littered with too many bodies.

The black guy in front of him, the one with no patience to wait for the barely conscious man to situate himself and get up on his own, grabbed Dean's white (well, not so much anymore) dress shirt and pulled up.

During his rapid ascent, Dean heard a loud sound of tearing that he really hoped had been made by the hideous shirt that his corporate self had chosen to wear and not by something that he valued more, like his skin. "Easy on the goods, Sinbad" he managed to hiss out as the world danced and changed colors wildly around him.

A disturbingly large hand slapped his face around so hard that Dean could actually hear his neck crack. He decided it was wise to shut up, at least until he could figure who these yahoos were and what they wanted from him. Or, you know, until he could focus enough to actually see the yahoos.

He covertly looked around. There was a lot of green around and in the distance, Dean thought he could hear water running. Much nearer, closer than he felt comfortable with, were the three strangers.

One was a large black man, a neatly trimmed mustache contrasting brutally with the yellow teeth and the cigar stub hanging from his lips; the other was a woman with bright red hair, whom under different circumstances Dean would actually find appealing, were it not for the predatory look in her eyes and the invasive way her hands were holding the belt loop of his pants, on the pretext of keeping him upright.

The third was yet another man, a wiry guy with a mullet hair cut, who kind of reminded him of Ash, except for the little beetle-like eyes and pock-marked face. Any resemblance faded completely when the guy's cold, lifeless stare locked on Dean; a keen sense of loss for the geeky computer genius they'd lost in the fire at the Roadhouse suddenly swamped his soul.

Three guys, plus, Dean guessed, that there would be another one driving the car and probably even a fifth person riding shotgun.

"Focus!" Beetle eyes said, punctuating his request with another slap to the back of Dean's head.

The Winchester did just that, his mouth shut but the sharp look in his eyes expressing clearly what he was focusing on. Squashed beetle.

Up ahead, the door of the pickup opened with a squeak and a pair of booted feet hit the ground. Dean turned his head, eyeing the driver as he made his way back. "Bring that trash over here."

Dean didn't have to do a thing. The big black guy, hands still fisting his shirt, just pushed him out and let gravity take care of the rest.

For the whole two seconds that it took his body to fly from the back of the pickup to land on the unforgiving ground, the only thing that Dean could think was that... that was going to hurt.

He wasn't wrong.

Without use of his hands to break his fall, Dean landed on his face, feeling his nose crack on the impact. "Shit!"  
"Get'im up!"

Before the order had even registered, there were hands under Dean's armpits and suddenly there was nothing but air under his feet until he registered the pain as his back crashed against a tree trunk. Opening his eyes, Dean spit the blood that had slid from his broken nose in to his throat.

The action struck him as strangely familiar and suddenly Dean remembered that only three weeks ago, Alistair had broken his nose too. Come to think of it, Alistair had broken a lot of stuff that didn't feel broken now – except for his nose, of course.

Dean guessed that Castiel's boss had fixed all of that, getting him ready and dandy to be angel-jacked from the hospital and stuck in a pretend life for all those weeks, waiting for Dean to 'come around' and accept his fate. And just in time to have his face broken again by the merry group gathering around him now.

"Who the fuck are you people and what the fuck do you want?" Dean asked in a nasal voice, forgetting his vow of silence and bent on finding some answers. His life was too full of questions lately for him to fuck around waiting for the bad guy's monologue.

"I'm Eeny," the Mexican guy said, pointing at himself with a sarcastic smile, "that's Meeny," indicating the woman, "and those are Miny and Moe."

Dean blinked. "Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Moe… that's funny man, real funny," he said without humor. "Does that make me the Tiger?"

His only answer was a meaty fist in his exposed stomach, the soft flesh bending over the assault and squishing inside him, taking room in his lugs, where air should be.

"No, he's Tiger," the black man said matter-of-factly, pointing at one more guy who chose that moment to exit the truck. "You're his toes, coño!"

When Dean was able to clear his watered vision he got a load of the newcomer. Tiger was tall. And he looked way too pleased with himself.

"Dean Winchester," Tiger said as a greeting. "We have a lot to talk about."

......................

 

"Hey, Bobby, it's Sam."

The words had barely left his mouth when Bobby started ripping him a new one. Sam just barely managed to pull the receiver from his ear, narrowly salvaging his eardrums from the older hunter's verbal tirade. Wincing, he stared at the phone; even from this distance Bobby's angry shouts were easily discernible.

"Don't ya 'hey Bobby' me, kid! Three weeks without hearing a goddamn word from either of you two id'jits and suddenly it's all 'hey Bobby'! I was worried sick, not knowing if you damn fools were even alive... going off, disappearing like that from the damn hospital! Couldn't you at least pick up a damn phone to let me know everything's alright? Or are you two taking a page out of John Winchester's book and ignoring your goddamn voicemails too?"

Sam sighed, letting the older man rant at will. Truth was, he didn't even know where his cell phone was. The one he was using was Sam Wesson's phone and that one only had fast food places and girls' numbers on it.

Bobby worried, Sam knew that, and the fact that their lives had gotten just a little bit more complicated ever since Dean got out of Hell didn't ease that particular behavior. In fact, it only made it worse.

"Everything's not alright, Bobby," Sam finally managed to wedge in. "Dean's been taken."

"What do you mean 'been taken'?" Bobby asked cautiously, the scolding gone from his tone.

Given everything that had been happening, it was a fair question. Bobby knew that Castiel and Uriel had pretty much snatched Dean right out from under Sam's proverbial nose. Since then, for them, there was being taken and being taken.

"None of our usual players… just two guys and a woman, in a gas station in Ohio, outside Cleveland," Sam told the older man.

"What the hell were you two doing in Cleveland?"

"We… It's a really long story, Bobby, half of which even I don't know," Sam stopped himself before he could start spilling everything that had happened since the last time they had seen Bobby, at Pamela's funeral. Now was not the time.

Sam took a breath and continued, "All I got is a black Ford pickup truck in the name of a Miguel Ruiz, a bottle red-head that was hanging out with him and a big guy who wears army boots size fourteen… any of this ring any bells to you?"

"Sounds like the beginning of a really bad joke," Bobby said from the other side of the line. Sam could almost imagine him scratching his beard in thought. "Why would any of those people mean anything to me?"

"Because they were waiting for him, Bobby," Sam replied, revealing the real reason why he had called the hunter in the first place. "They're all human, as far as I can tell. Just plain human, Bobby. This wasn't some random snatch for kicks or body parts either… they were waiting for Dean."

Bobby was a sharp tack. He understood what Sam wasn't saying. There was only one sort of people that knew enough about the name Winchester to set a trap like that for one of them. "I don't know any hunter by the name Ruiz, but I'll ask around, discretely… how long has Dean been gone?"

Sam looked at the watch, rubbed his face and sighed. "Two hours, give or take."

"Ok… We'll find him, Sam, you'll see," Bobby said in parting. 'In one piece' was left unmentioned because, at his core, Bobby was too much of a realist to actually believe that to be true.

..........................

There are a couple of places in a guy's anatomy that are pretty much guaranteed to be extremely painful when messed with. Some of these Dean had learned from his father's lessons, some he had learned from personal experience. And while his father had been more of a theory kind of guy when it came to torture, Alistair was a very... hands-on kind of teacher.

Now whipping and beating a guy silly, breaking fingers and pulling out fingernails, fire hoses and burning sticks, those are all well tested and valid options that have been in use for decades on a row. They are also boring and lacking in artistic originality.

Predictable.

And torture is all about what you can't prepare your body to take; all that surprises you in to screaming the answers that are being sought.

Alistair had been all for the artistic forms of torture.

Take the neck, for example. Everyone knows that the neck is, basically, your connection between the cockpit and the rest of the machine. That fact alone gives you a couple of choices right there.

You can go for the obvious and push the guy's throat in, which, besides being incredible painful and claustrophobic, also prevents the guy from answering any questions. Or you can go for the elaborate and push his throat out… or at least make him feel like that's what you're doing. Two fingers carefully placed on each side of the guy's pipe and you just squeeze. Push hard enough and you actually end up popping the guy's windpipe all the same.

Lower, you have the sternum, or more specifically, the tip of that bone, just at the base, smack-dab in the middle of the chest. Now, this particular spot is a bit tricky to find, but on a long term, proves much more effective than simply breaking a rib or two. Certainly broken ribs can be painful, but the risk of puncturing something that will cause a guy to bleed to death or drown in his own blood in a matter of seconds is too high and therefore, not very productive.

Now this tiny bone… spearhead-shaped, very easy to break and sure to cause internal bleeding, but one that won't turn serious for hours and hours, with the plus side that every time the guy tries to breathe, the fact that the break is right in the middle, makes him wonder if there are knives inside both his lungs.

If you break it the right way, the guy's actually right about that.

Lower still, you can go for the knees. Bony little things that they are, they're not the sturdiest of bones and any well placed blow to the kneecap can easily shatter it or displace it. Either option is valid. And extremely painful.

In the other hand, if the aim is for both humiliation and causing pain, there's always, of course, the guy's balls. Eyeballs are a good place to start, but the ones seating between the guy's legs are much more productive, no pun intended. Now those are, per definition, extremely sensitive. Usually, for good reasons, not so much when under torture.

There are a number of things that can be done down there, but whichever is chosen, the results are always easier to achieve if the guy's aroused. More blood to be spilled, skin more sensitive and prone to be punished.

There are a number of ways you can get that to that particular state of being. The more obvious way, which depending of your own sexual tendencies and personal preferences, can be very pleasant for the torturer as much as it is unpleasant for the tortured; asphyxiation, which, again, presents the same problem of difficult control as the crushed windpipe; and electrical shock way, which requires toys and props.

Either way you chose, it's only when the area is extra sensitive that's when the fun begins. And once that happens, anything goes. Anything.

Usually, by the time Alistair had gone through most of these and finally pulled his blade out to come and play, it was a welcome relief.

Fortunately for Dean, these guys didn't know any of this. He can't really deal with artistic anymore.

..........................

"Do I know you?" Dean asked. There was no point in denying his identity. Given that they'd been waiting for him in that gas station, it was obvious that they knew exactly who he was. How the hell could they have known his exact location, was what was beyond Dean's understanding. With the millions of gas stations in the country, how could have they guessed the exact one he would be in when not even Dean could've guessed that a couple of hours ago?

Sam had been waiting in the car at the gas station.

He looked around covertly. The truck looked empty now and they were in the middle of nowhere. Dean couldn't see Sam anywhere.  
Any other time before their lives had been turned upside down, Dean's first thought at waking up would be to check where Sam was. Now, it had taken him this long to actually think that these yahoos might have caught Sam too. Dean doubted it though.

Somehow, in between Sam's new in charge attitude, the air of command that his mere presence exude and the fact that Sam had single handily defeated a demon who not even an angel had been able to smite, Dean figured that these merry group of hunters wouldn't have stood a chance even if they had tried.

Dean couldn't decide which was saddest. The fact that the concern for his younger brother was no longer the first thing on his mind or that he had failed in avoiding being taken by a group that Sam could've easily defeated.

"You don't know me, but we have a couple of common friends… a couple of dead hunter friends," Tiger, in his army jacket and scruffy boots, spoke. No introduction, no gloating, no tease. Straight to business.

Dean could feel himself starting to sweat. Hunters. Just what he needed right now.

"So, this is what we'll do," the newcomer said, nearing the place where Dean was held up by Mustache and Beetle-Eyes.

He sounded polite and pleasant, like a client ordering a bouquet. Not too cocky, not too excited, just the right amount of glee and emotionless that you would expect from a professional. Which made Tiger all the more dangerous in Dean's book.

"I'll tell you everything that I already know, and then you'll tell everything else. We behave like a couple of gentlemen and part ways in a civilized manner," Tiger went on, carefully and calmly lying his terms of the game. "Everyone goes to bed happy tonight… what do you say?"

Dean kept his mouth shut. Something about the man's poise and attitude made him measure and contain any hardwired, smart-assed reply. This guy knew something, and Dean wanted to know what.

He wasn't disappointed.

"I'll go first... you died last May," he started, looking closely to catch the reaction in Dean's eyes. Satisfied with whatever he'd seen there, Tiger went on. "And then, about four months after that, there's a bunch of messages on a bunch of dead hunters' answering machines from someone claiming to be Dean Winchester and sounding an awful lot like you."

Dean gulped and forced himself to not react in any other form. Fresh out of Hell and still reeling from the fact that an angel had rescued him, the last thing on Dean's mind when the whole rising of the witness mess had happened, was that he really, really should be keeping a low profile. The hunter community was made of a suspicious and deeply paranoid crowd. Dead hunters using the phone was a big no-no.

So, instead, Dean had promptly and loudly announced his return to pretty much every hunter contact on Bobby's phone book. Even if he had thought that his demise had gone unnoticed by other hunters, Dean should have figured that something like this could backfire on him. Apparently, it had.

"And that wasn't even the first time that hunter's have died or disappeared near the Winchesters, is it?" Tiger said, like his nickname-sake, prowling around his trapped prey with hungry eyes. "Gordon and Kubrick showed up dead over a year ago… guess who they were hunting at the time?"

It was a rhetorical question. The man clearly knew about Gordon's obsession with Sam and his anti-Christ crazy theories. Even if they'd had nothing to do with Kubrick's death, it still looked bad.

"Travis too… one day we hear that he's hooking up with John Winchester's kids, the next he's gone."

Tiger paused, looked at Dean, measuring up how much of the revelations had hit home.

Dean met his gaze steadily. The man was too well informed for his liking, which only made him dread what it was that he wanted to know.

"And then," Tiger continued after a moment, "there's the demon- talk... they've been awfully chatty lately."

'Here it comes' Dean thinks, cringing inside at what sort of details those demonic sons of bitches were blabbing about these days. There was plenty to chose, from Sam's demon blood and psychic abilities, to his own trip down under and untimely resurrection.

He and Sam already had Hell and the angry, rebellious part of Heaven on their backs… they really, really didn't need some misguided hunters breathing down their necks too.

"In between the shit and lies that they usually spit out, a couple start making comments about you and your brother… of how you spent your summer rotting in Hell, of how Sam isn't exactly what we might call… what's the word?... Human. Of how the apocalypse is so near that they don't even mind being sent back to Hell, because soon the difference between up here and down there, won't be any different at all," the man said, his voice slowly sinking in to lower, deeper tones. "Following me so far?"

Dean staid silent. He had to admit, this guy's knowledge of the facts, was scarily dead-on. While the Winchester mask of indifference held firm, underneath Dean was starting to squirm and itch to bolt. Bad as it was, though, Dean still sensed that Tiger was in no way finished and a part of him was just curious to know how much more these men knew.

Tiger drew nearer, his gaze mocking Dean, challenging him to deny any of this as he went on, taking his silence for acceptance. "When I got word that the fucking Winchesters and the end of the world were somehow connected with each other- I wasn't even surprised anymore. That, somehow you, Dean, were involved in how the whole mess started and seemed hell bend on having something to do with how it would end. No… what did surprise me was why the hell you would sit on something like this and not do a damn thing to help your fellow man... if you even still rank in that definition!"

Dean stopped breathing. This was bad. How the hell could they known something that not even he was aware of until recently?

It made some sense to him that a few of the demons who had been in Hell at the same time he'd been would know what Dean had done down there. It even stood to reason that a couple of them with pay grades high enough would have heard about the whole prophesy crap. But tell it to hunters? Why risk everything like that? Just to gloat? Not even demons were that dumb.

Tiger's paw hit Dean's head with a snap, calling the younger man's attention back to the here and now.

"Pay attention, 'cause now I'll be telling you what I want to know," Tiger went on, his voice gentle and conspiratorial, like he was imparting some secret. "I want to know what kind of deal you made to get out of Hell, how that's connected to the end of the world, how your sorry ass is linked to it all and how we stop it."

Dean met Tiger's gaze, unflinching, defiant.

The whole group was looking expectedly at Dean as Tiger took two steps back, waiting. Their trust in Tiger's ability to get what he wanted was such that they actually believed that all he had to do was ask and the answers would be provided. Just like that.

The truth, however, was not something that Dean could share with anyone. The truth was something that Dean could barely stand to share with those he trusted, never mind perfect strangers. Perfect, angry and dangerous strangers. Even if he did, they wouldn't believe him anyway.

And since the truth was out of the option pool, there was only one thing that Dean could do. Give free reign to his ass, the smart-ass cheek.

"You know, I should've guessed that a buckets of crazy guy like you would be buddies with Gordon," Dean said, shaking his head as if he didn't believed in the whole nonsense of the thing. "Guess nuts really do come together, like a whole big family of shit-for-brains, crazy-eyed motherfuc–… argh!"

Pepe hadn't liked the label. The brutal kick to Dean's right knee, producing a pop that send a wave of pain and numbness all over his leg, would've send Dean folding in to the ground if it hadn't been for Mustache and Beetle-Eyes still holding him up.

Dean bit his lip, holding the whimper inside and turned murderous eyes on Pepe. The Mexican man was either too confident for his own good or too much of a dammed idiot to realize the danger and threat in that look.

Gingerly putting his foot back down, Dean tested his weight on the leg for a few seconds. The pain was still there, still strong. Yup, something had definitely popped. Dean could already feel his knee swelling up inside his jeans.

"On that... note," Dean went on as soon as he could manage to catch his breath, "I have no idea what the hell you're talking about."

Tiger actually seemed offended by that. He closed the distance between the two of them and in one swift move, ripped open the already wrecked shirt Dean was wearing. One fierce pull and Dean's shoulders were bare for all to see. The mark left behind on his shoulder by Castiel's touch was bright red against the pale skin.

"Does this refresh your memory?"

Each finger perfectly outlined, Dean looked at the now familiar burn-mark like he had never seen it before. How could they even know that was there? "Birth mark," he said matter-of-factly. "Had it since I was a little girl."

Whatever retribution Dean was expecting for his smart-assed remark, Tiger wasn't gonna play into it. He simply stared at his prisoner, allowing the knowledge to sink in to Dean's mind that he was at this man's mercy; hard blue eyes unblinking, promising a thousand unpleasant things to follow, giving time for Dean to sweat out all the possibilities. "Take his clothes off," Tiger eventually said, the calmness back in his voice and face. "Shoes too."

The reaction was immediate. Bucking and squirming, Dean tried to break free of the two men holding him. But, between their bulk and the tree trunk at his back, he hadn't much room to move. "You should know that I don't put out on the first date, man," Dean said, forcing the humor and nonchalance in to his voice even as he cringed inside at the turn of events.

Red-hair actually licked her lips as she watched Pepe move closer to reach for Dean's zipper.

The second Pepe was close enough, Dean struck.

The pain in his right knee forgotten, Dean shifted and lashed out with his left leg. The kick landed with solid force in Pepe's crotch, doubling him over. With the Mexican's head down and within easy reach, Dean threw his weight back and swung his legs up, sending the four of them crashing to the ground. Scissoring in midair, he caught Pepe around the neck and locked his ankles around him.

One quick twist and Pepe's neck would snap.

Beetle-Eyes was the first one to recover and react. With a quick move that saved Pepe's life, he delivered a sharp whack, elbow high that caught Dean in the temple. The solid blow landed with enough force to send Dean's head crashing back, connecting with the tree in a sickening thud.

Dean's legs lost some their strength as the world dimmed around him. But the rest of the world wasn't important right then. The only thing that matter in those few seconds was Pepe's life in between his ankles and not letting go of the only advantage that he had so far. Muscles functioning on memory alone, no real conscious thought behind the action, Dean managed to hold Pepe's head hostage between his crossed ankles, both men struggling to stay conscious.

The familiar sound of a gunshot was more than enough to clear the cobwebs from Dean's foggy mind. The discharge sound echoed for a long time in the desert forest. Scared by the harsh sound, birds and other animals scattered, their complaining cries at the unwelcome noise following their hasty retreat.

Dean couldn't help but flinch as the bullet landed inches from his face, lost deep in the tree's bark.

"Enough of this!" Tiger said, for the first time sounding close to losing his temper. The gun, barrel still smoking, was now pointing directly at Dean's head, "Let him go, or the next one will land right between your eyes."

Dean's vision focused enough to see the nine-millimeter that Tiger was aiming at him. Those were odds Dean knew he couldn't beat. With a resigned sigh, Dean unhooked his ankles and released a very red-faced, very pissed Pepe.

Glancing at the big guy, Dean ventured, "No hard feelings?"

Pepe's large fist landed on Dean's mouth with rattling force, adding strength and tune to the ringing inside his head. Dean woozily noticed as the Mexican man readied himself to throw another punch, arm pushed back in a Popeye-likeness that made him look silly instead of menacing.

Dean smiled, a row of red-stained teeth robbing the gesture of any pleasantness.

"What you smiling at, coño? You like pain?"

Dean spit out a mouthful of gunk and blood on the floor, carefully aiming at Pepe's shoes. "You guys are pathetic," Dean said. "You actually believe that the end of the world is coming… and this is what you chose to do to fight it?"

None of the hunters answered him and Dean realized that, deep down, they were just as scared as everyone else, without a clue on what to do.

So they did what was in their power to do.

The next blow was strong enough to send Dean directly in to a deep, dark oblivion.

..................

There are a couple of things that were never meant to be done while naked. Being frog marched through dense foliage was surely one of them.

Ever since he'd woken up to find himself stark naked and being carried like a side of beef over Mustache's shoulder, Dean had decided that none of these guys would live long enough to see the end of the world. Dean vowed he would end their miserable existences long before any apocalypse could take place, starting with Pepe. Judging by the sizes of the new bruises, the Mexican apparently had no quarrels in beating up a guy when he's already unconscious. Yup, gonna start with him.

Dean hurt in places that he didn't even want to think about. His face felt like raw meat, skin stretched too tight and pulsing with deep throbs where no throb was supposed to beat.

The second Dean stirred awake, Mustache had unceremoniously dumped him on the forest floor without a second thought about branches or rocks that might break the prisoner's fall. After that, things had only improved.

This was not how Dean envisioned spending his day; being led by his bound hands like a stray dog on a leash, and at such a brisk pace that gave him no chance to watch where he stepped. Adding to the hell his right knee was already giving him, somewhere along his forced march, a rock had upgraded itself to a knife and sliced through his foot. Pepe, taking great pleasure in being the one leading Dean along, gave him no time to even limp, which meant that each time Dean put his right foot down to bear his weight, all kinds of pretty stars flashed before his eyes.

More than once, after regaining consciousness, Dean had entertained the idea of telling Tiger the truth. Though, usually it was only after having another exposed body part viciously poked, prickled or slashed by the surrounding forest. But time and again, his mind always came back to the same question: what do you do when the truth is so ludicrous that no one would believe you anyway?

He could just imagine it... 'It's like this: an angel of the Lord named Castiel plucked me out of Hell, not because I was a good little boy and did my homework, but because God needed me to stop the apocalypse, because, apparently, I was the one to start it in the first place! Now, get this, 'cause this is the really funny part: I have no idea how to do that and the angel that is supposed to help me with it... he hasn't a clue either!'

Yeah... Tiger would laugh his ass off on that one. And then shoot him dead.

Speaking of the devil...

"We're here."

....................

 

Sam found himself driving back to Cleveland. He had needed a place with Internet connection and the nearby city had been the obvious choice. Plus, he had to find a place where he could stay and fight the urge to keep on driving, aimlessly and with no point of reference, just looking for Dean. Just DO something.

Planting himself at one of the thousands of small coffee shops inside the city limits, laptop open on his table, a myriad of scribbled papers stacked around and his cell phone in close range, Sam looked like any other of the many students that strolled the city streets.

The fact that in his browsing history of his computer were a couple of federal and government agencies whose pages he'd hacked into for information was just one of the small details that made him stand apart.

The third coffee that he had ordered about half an hour ago lay cold and forgotten near Sam's cell phone. Every couple of seconds he would peel his eyes from the computer screen and look at the small device, fearful that, despite the fierce shrill that it gave when it rang, Sam might've missed a call.

Sam just wanted that phone to ring.

Ring with his brother's voice on the other side, having somehow miraculously escaped his mysterious captors and demanding to be picked up from some out-of-woods backdrop.

Ring with the captors' voices, demanding some sort of delusional exchange of something implausible and laughable for Dean, something ridiculous but that would at least give him a sign that his brother was indeed still alive.

Ring with Bobby's voice, telling him he knew who had Dean and where he was.

Just ring.

Sam had considered summoning Castiel to ask for his help. The angel seemed particularly fond of his brother and would probably answer his call, but every time Sam found himself going over the list of herbs and props necessary for the summoning ritual, all he could think of was the look the angel had given him when Sam had killed Alistair. It was an incredulous, slightly scared look that made Sam wonder if the only thing stopping the angel from smiting him there and then had been the utter surprise and shock of what he'd just seen. A surprise and shock that would be missing if he called the angel now.

Each time that thought would come, Sam ended up deciding that he wouldn't risk being smitten by Castiel's wrath. Not yet, anyway. Give it five more minutes and he probably wouldn't care any longer.

It had been three hours since Dean had been taken. Three hours spent in the hands of God knows who, being put through God knows what.

Sam had taken a whole afternoon to find Dean when the angels had taken him; Dean had been in Alistair's hands for less than fifteen minutes - this time around, anyway- and he'd been half dead when Sam had found him. Three hours was an eternity.  
Sam could call Ruby. Maybe she could cast that handy spell again, pinpoint Dean's location…

The phone rang.

"Bobby?" Sam asked hopefully, even though he had seen the caller ID, praying for some good news.

On the other side of the call, the older hunter sighed. Not a good sign. "Got some bad news, Sam."

The younger Winchester took a deep breath and ran a hand through his unruly hair. "Good news, bad news… at this point I just want some news, Bobby," he said, trying not to sound as desperate as he truly felt.

"The guy you told me about, Ruiz, he's a hunter alright," Bobby confirmed. "The bottle red-hair is his sister-in-law. Started hunting together when his brother was killed. They usually hang out with another hunter, guy named Peter Tigermman."

"Name doesn't ring a bell," Sam butted in as he furiously scribbles down the names of his brother's kidnappers. The ones living on borrowed time.

"Yeah, but the crew he used to hang around with should… Tigermman and Gordon were real close buddies."

"Fuck!"

"That about sums it up, yeah," Bobby agreed. "Back in their day, Tigermman and Gordon served in the same regiment. Really top secret shit. Built quite the reputation for themselves after that," the hunter added with a slight trepidation to his voice.

"What sort of reputation?" Sam asked, already knowing that he wouldn't like the answer.

"They're just stories, Sam… old stories that won't help us find your brother."

"WHAT stories, Bobby?" Sam reinforced, his voice allowing a tiny bit of the power growing inside him to escape. On the other side, he could hear Bobby gulp.

"Stories about how far they would go to get what they wanted... stories about people being found in the middle of the desert with broken legs and evidences of being drowned to death even though the only water around was the one in their lungs," Bobby relayed. He knew how this would sound to Sam and he knew exactly the images that were going on inside the young man's mind right then. "Stories about their definition of 'what's to be hunted' and 'what's not' being very blurry."

"Jesus! Bobby… I…" Sam stopped, closing his eyes to stop his thoughts from going any darker. "Fuck! I don't get it… Gordon's axe to grind was with me, not Dean. Why the hell would Tigermman take Dean in the first place? I was right there and they didn't even try!" He vented. The fact that he had been the one to actually kill Gordon, therefore adding to Tigermman's reasons to come after him instead, went unsaid. Bobby didn't know about that and Sam wasn't about to share that piece of information now of all times.

"I have no idea, Sam… none of this makes a lick of sense," Bobby said, the weariness clear in his tone. "A contact of mine is looking in to Ruiz' home address, maybe we can put a tap on the guy and see where they're keeping Dean. I'm on my way to you right now. Just… just don't go doing anything stupid until I get there, ok?"

Sam looked at the computer, watching as the site he'd hacked into to get the GPS signal to Ruiz' truck was still running its course. "Sure thing Bobby… call me when you get here," Sam said, a cold and determined look in his face as he closed the cell phone and ended the call.

...................

"We're here."

They were all standing in the middle of a decrepit looking train bridge, one that looked like it hadn't fulfilled its purpose in over twenty years. Half the train tracks were gone, with occasional spurts of yellowed weeds coming from the gravel and the rotten wood. The rust that had taken over the iron structure of the bridge gave it a red tinge that made the whole thing look like it was covered in blood.

Dean shivered as a gush of cold wind raised goosebumps all over his exposed skin.

"Now's a good time to start talking, Winchester… what's it gonna be?" Tiger asked, waiting until he was standing right in front of the chilled man before snuggling deeper in to his warm coat. "It's getting kind of chilly and I really wanted to get this thing done and over before I went home."

"What was the question again?" Dean asked, clenching his teeth to stop them from chattering. He was not about to give the man that satisfaction.

"The question, Dean, is whether you want a quick death or a very, very slow one, because, either way, I have no use for you if don't tell me the answers I want."

Dean chuckled. "Your sales pitch sucks, man. Anyone ever tell you that?"

The tall man smiled as he took a clear plastic bag from his coat. The confident stride as he neared Dean and the quiet, content smirk in his face worked a lot faster to chill Dean to the bone than the weather did. "You ever see a man drown, Dean? Have you ever experienced for yourself that helpless feeling of opening your mouth to suck air and get absolutely nothing in return?"

Dean looked away, ignoring the question, focusing on the old bolts that were keeping the bridge from collapsing. He had always associated bridges with water, but there was no water running under this one. If the bridge chose that particular moment to fall down, they wouldn't drown, they would be pancakes.

Like all of Alistair's lessons, too recent in memory and too painful to forget, the mere mention of that frantic struggle for air brought to the forefront of Dean's mind the more recent events. Dean could feel it happening all over again, the demons' fingers ghosting over his flesh, pushing into his throat, leaving him gasping for air. He felt it even now, when no one was touching him.  
"I tell you… a man would do just about anything to get that next mouthful of air. It gives quite a rush to whomever holds the power to decide to either give, or deny that next breath," Tiger whispered near Dean's ear, relinquish the fact that he had finally succeeded in ripping a shiver from the other man.

Dean took a step back, his action thwarted mid way by the arms holding him in place. He sighed, hands held out in a non-threatening gesture to appease Tiger. "Even if I did have those answers," Dean said, talking in earnest for the first time, "you wouldn't believe me."

"Try me."

Dean looked at the man in front of him, focusing on the steal eyes and expecting stance. With one glance at the two thugs holding him each by one arm, Tiger ordered Dean some space. His reward for agreeing to open his mouth.

Dean hoped that this guy was very opened minded, or else it would be a very long fall from where he stood to the bottom of the ravine under them. Given that he didn't know how to fly, Dean decided to give it a shot.

"I didn't make a deal to get out of Hell… and no one made one for me either," he added because, if that had been his first theory, it was fair to assume that it would be Tiger's too. "There were no demons involved in any way. I was pulled out by… by an angel."

In the following silence, Dean could easily hear the rustling of leaves on the trees and the wind blowing through the hill.

Then laughter exploded.

Bottle-red, Mustache and Beetle-Eyes were laughing like a pack of hyenas. Pepe, on the other hand, crossed himself, looking at Dean like he'd just spit on his mother's grave.

"You were right," Tiger said, a smile playing too in his lips. "I don't believe you, not even one bit. But I'm curious," he said, one short gesture silencing the surrounding cackle "Why would an angel, of all creatures, go to the trouble to fight his way in to Hell just to take you out?"

Dean sighed. No matter how many times he heard it or tried it for measure inside his head, this next part never failed to sound massively ridiculous even to him. "According to Ca… this angel, I'm the one that's supposed to stop the Apocalypse from happening."

There was no laughter this time. But the silence and the snarl on Tiger's face was far worse.

"How convenient," Tiger said, a flick of his hand signaling Mustache and Beetle-Eyes that Dean's chance to talk had come and gone and that they could take repossession of his arms. "Guess that means that it would be really bad for the world if we were to kill you, wouldn't it?"

Dean tried to push the other men away, but his leg chose that exact moment to give out and once again Dean found himself supported by the two goons at his side.

"What the hell do you want me to tell you?" Dean asked with a gasp. He was getting tired of the constant manhandling. "If you won't believe the truth, I can always make up a couple of bed time stories just for you and you merry band here!"

"Guess there's an easy way for me to believe your story, Dean Winchester," Tiger said, Dean's name sounding like a curse in the other man's lips. "If an angel comes down from the heavens in all of his glorious form, right now, and rescues you, I'll not only release you, but go so far as to swear myself to your cause and obey your every command," Tiger said, turning his back on Dean. The mocking tone of his vice was enough to let Dean know how improbable the other man though that was to happen.

Nothing happen. No angel, no rescue, not even a flickering of the sunlight to make them wonder about a presence or not of any god, watching them, paying attention.

Was it really that much of a waste if Tiger and his people killed Dean now? Because Castiel didn't seemed all that knowledgeable of what part Dean was suppose to play in the whole Apocalypse thing, and Uriel wanted the end to come so badly that he had given Dean's head on a plate to Alistair... and Alistair had all but bought him dinner and roses over what Dean had done already.

Could he really count on Castiel to come in like a damn knight in shining armor and rescue him? Dean highly doubted that. His personal angel hadn't even been around when Dean Smith got his existence created and then summarily erased, and whether Castiel had been pushed away from him or had simply given up on trying to pull something useful out of Dean, that was anyone's guess.

"Get on with it," Tiger snapped, tired of pretending that he was giving divine intervention time to happen. "We're losing day light."

Before Dean could realize that Tiger was no longer addressing him, Mustache had already grabbed his shoulders and pushed him down, forcing Dean to lie on his back on the pebbled ground near the tracks.

After his little stunt with Pepe, the hunters were taking no more chances. While Mustache kept his hold on Dean's shoulders, the other two men held on to his legs.

Dean tried to buck free of them, body contorting like a vicious eel. It was of no use, and all it got him where bruised-shaped finger prints where the three men were holding him down and grazed skin on his back, where it rubbed viciously against the ground.

Bottle-red neared him cautiously, rope coiled in her hands. Dean watched with wide eyes as she tied one end to the bridge's metal frame and the other to his left ankle. "T'hell are you doing, bitch?"

Pepe, eyes still red-rimmed from his earlier 'interaction' with Dean, took pleasure in punching him in his swollen knee. "That's the mother of my niece you're talking about, pendejo!"

Dean clenched his eyes, water leaking from the edges as he bit down the scream that demanded release.

Two tugs to make sure that the rope wouldn't loosen up on either end and the bulky men released their hold on the prisoner.

With the bruising hold on him gone, Dean gave into his renewed agony. Rolling to his side, he drew the swollen and throbbing joint to his chest, wrapping bound hands around his knee, a desperate but fruitless attempt to ease the pain.

"Get up," Tiger commanded, booted feet filling Dean's field of vision.

Dean didn't even try. He had a pretty good idea of what Tiger was planning and had already decided that he was not in the mood to play along.

Tiger was in no mood to play either. Bending over, the man simply picked up the rope lying on the ground and dragged Dean over to the edge of the bridge.

Not built with the intent to have people strolling around on it, the train bridge had no rail at all. No boundary to stand between the tracks and the edge where the only thing that lay was the nothingness of empty air.

Too late, Dean tried to get up. Failing miserably, while his body slid over the gravel and uneven wood of the train tracks, Dean could find no leverage or place to hang on or pull back.

Fighting the natural instinct of using his hands to protect the more fragile parts of his exposed male anatomy, Dean instead reached for the rope that was dragging him closer and closer to the edge. Even if that piece of cord was able to stop his fall, Dean was sure that it wouldn't be a fun trip or a happy stop.

Thanks to the handcuffs that forced his hands into an awkward position, his grasp on the line was tenuous at best. Try as he might, and he did, there was no strength to the gesture and he could not manage a tight grip of the tether line securing his leg. Still, as soon as his fingers brushed the rope, Dean pulled with all his might, determined to fight.

It was enough to faze Tiger for a few seconds, a ineffectual game of tug-o-war between prey and predator. Tiger couldn't quite understand what Dean was trying to accomplish when it was so painfully obvious that he was at a disadvantage. He had no idea of what stubborn mules the Winchester men could be.

Dean took advantage of Tiger's momentary hesitation and hooked his free leg around the other man's shins. Tripping, Tiger lost his balance more out of surprise than out of the force behind the move.

Because the only free leg that Dean had was his busted knee leg. And his busted knee didn't appreciate the move one bit.

Dean blacked out for a couple of seconds, nothing but the sharp, hot stab of pain in his leg registering in his mind.

Before Dean could recover and follow up on his desperate move, or at least take a bit of satisfaction from the fact that he'd sent Tiger to his knees, Dean felt a powerful tug on his bound hands, the strange feeling of weightlessness that came from being hulled up too fast to adjust and then, the unstoppable notion that his body was moving forward, away from the safe ground of the bridge beneath his feet and that there was nothing that he could do.

One second was all he had to realize just how up high they really were. One second for a brief glimpse of the breath-taking view around; a fleeting impression of the cityscape and the large lake a small distance away. Then the world was swirling madly around as he was pushed and gravity took charge; the ground left his feet and he was falling. Dean never figured that a distance that, by his quick calculations, was of about four stories high, took quite that long to cover.

At a dizzying speed, the canopy of the trees charged past, then shrank farther and farther away. Speed increasing, the once discernible landscape colors were now a blur of green and blue, sometimes intertwined with the grey of the ground bellow. The ground, rushing to meet him faster and faster. Unmoving, unchangeable, hard rock.

Dean closed his eyes, for a brief moment convinced that the hunters had made their calculations of the rope length wrong, and he would be nothing more than a red stain at the bottom of the ravine.

There was no warning or time to fear the end. The only difference between free falling and hanging in suspension was the deep jolt that traversed Dean's entire body and the sickening sound, resonating through his core, of something breaking as he came to an abrupt stop.

Dean had literally reached the end of his rope. After that, he knew no more.

...................

"Can I get you anything else?"

Sam pried his eyes away from the computer's bright screen and focused on the waitress. She was probably around his age, but looked painfully young next to him, with her dark blond hair and bright blue gaze. The lines of tiredness were there in the corners of her eyes, a statement of long hours on the job and probably another part-time elsewhere just to make the money reach the end of the month, but there were no dark clouds hiding inside her gaze.

Sam longed for that kind of tiredness, honest to God exhaustion that came from a normal job and everyday problems. Instead, his exhaustion was born out of going more than three weeks since tasting Ruby's blood; exhaustion of fighting against something inside of him that more and more looked like their only hope of wining this war; exhaustion over not being able to protect his brother even from mere humans. Exhaustion from too long hours of research that gave no fruits and staring at a computer, willing the search engine to run faster.

It had been only a few hours since he'd stopped being Sam Wesson and already Sam Winchester was missing it. How messed up was his brain that, when stuck in a normal life, he couldn't wait to start being a hunter and then, once back to being a hunter, he was longing for the long hours of boredom and mindless droning over a phone trying to explain basic stuff to computer-challenged people?

The waitress was still waiting, Sam realized, dull pencil rhythmically bouncing on her notepad to the rhythm of her gum chewing. He looked at the coffee cup on his table, still more than half full.

"Do you have any pie?" he found himself asking.  
She smiled at that, the relief showing in her honest sigh. Clearly, someone had informed her that it was her job to get this particular customer to start spending some money or pick up his stuff and go. She probably wasn't all that eager to impose the second option.

"We have pecan, apple, chocolate, peach, strawberry, blueb-"

"Apple's fine," Sam said, briefly wondering how he'd managed to stumble in to the one place with the longest pie list ever. Dean would love it here. "And could you wrap me a slice of strawberry and one of apple to go?"

"Sure thing," she said, practically bouncing on her feet as she walked back to the counter. Sam felt old.

He looked at the computer again. The search of the name Bobby had provided him hadn't come up with much. Peter Tigermman, like most hunters, kept a low profile.

Even after some serious hacking on Sam's part, Tigermman's comprehensive military records were unattainable. Given their confidentiality, a complete explanation for Tigermman's exodus from the military wasn't part of any single file, though he did manage to pull bits and pieces from other accounts and the words 'dishonorable discharge' appeared a couple of times. Sam shuddered to think what sort of man Tigermman was and what sort of actions he might've done for the US Army to go from 'top secret' to 'you're not one of us and we're ashamed that you ever were'.

The blip in the GPS software pulled Sam's attention away from his dark thoughts. The thing was slower than an old turtle with arthritis and had taken its sweet time just to allow him access… and then took even a longer time to establish the satellite connection. At long last, Sam was online with the tracker device.

Finally, he had a location on Ruiz' truck. And if Ruiz was anywhere near that vehicle, he'd found Dean.

Sam looked at his watch. Bobby had been five hours away last time they'd talked. That had been barely an hour ago.

"Here's your pie," the waitress said as she placed the plastic plate with a generous slice of pie on the table, "and here's your order." She handed a paper bag to Sam with a flourish. "Enjoy!"

The smell of still hot apple pie hit Sam with a thousand memories, images of the numerous times he'd watched his brother devour slice after slice, face relaxed in bliss. Haste suddenly made Sam's skin crawl with need to find him, more urgent than ever. He looked at his watch again, remembering his promise to Bobby, and then at the blinking red light, calling to him from the Ohio topographic map.

Bobby was going to bite his head off.

"Could you bring me the check, please?"

........................

His hands were numb. Which was good, because his leg was on fire.

Dean gasped awake, for a second completely lost and confused about why the world was looking so weird. There were clouds on the ground. There weren't supposed to be clouds in the ground, were they?

"Welcome back," Tiger's voice came from too close. "Would hate to start this next part without your full attention."

Dean jerked away before he could stop himself or the words could register in his sluggish brain. Hanging from his broken leg, the sudden movement only served to swing him around and increase the pressure on the broken limb. "Son of a bitch!"

Dean wasn't sure if he was referring to any of the fuzzy images of the people around him or the way his life seemed to plot against him with a vengeance reserved only for the worst of enemies.

He blinked away the tears that had seemed to pool inside his eyelids and resisted the urge to shake his head to clear his vision. It was a odd thing to feel his tears roll up rather than down.

Tiger was still holding the plastic bag Dean had seen in his hand before, only now he could see water sloshing inside of it.

The second that image registered, the dots connected inside Dean's mind and his heart started hammering inside his chest. Unmoving, wide eyes, Dean watched as Tiger moved closer, his inverted figure looking like nothing more than long legs, moving casually, gracefully, like he had all the time in the world.

Dean felt like a worm at the end of the hook, helpless to do nothing more than wait for the fish's teeth to sink in. He tried throwing a punch with his bound hands as soon as Tiger was within range, but the position he was in screwed with his distances perception. He failed completely.

"Is this really necessary, man?" Dean tried to argue, moving the fight to his mouth when his fists couldn't prove his point. "I mean... look at me, I'm a hunter, just like you... we're on the same side, you idiot!"

"My side doesn't make deals with demons or gets free passes out of Hell," Tiger supplied as he forced Dean's head inside the transparent bag and held it around the prisoner's neck. "My side stopped being yours when you came back from the dead, like some filthy zombie!"

Dean didn't have time to take a deep breath.

Suddenly, the world outside was plunged through a filter of plastic and water before it reached his eyes, making everything look bigger and wider, like an extended and blurry version of reality. The water reached his nose first, gravity pushing the unwelcome liquid inside, clogging his sinuses and increasing the pressure inside his head. When it came to his mouth, Dean prayed that they would be that stupid and had truly forget to tape his mouth shut.

Quickly, opening his mouth, he began swallowing, fighting against the awkwardness of the position to drink the water as fast as he could. There may not be much air inside the bag but at least he wouldn't be trying to suck his oxygen from the water like some fish.

Unfortunately, stupid they were not. The fingers that Tiger had been keeping on Dean's neck moved aside and suddenly all he could hear was the gulpgulp of more water being poured down, the bag filled with more and more liquid.

Dean couldn't swallow fast enough. He'd fallen for Tiger's trick and now, with his mouth already full of water, he could do nothing more but thrash helplessly on his broken leg and, hopefully, drown fast.

Sad fact was, he was going to drown in the smallest amount of water ever known to drown a human being. And that was even worse than being kidnapped from a public toilet.

.........................

 

Alistair got bored of his knife, on occasion. Every other couple of years, he would try something different, introduce a new toy in to their games.

And the games that he played with Dean were always about choice. About Dean's lack of choice and about how long he took to realize that the only option he had was to do exactly what Alistair wanted.

Sometimes Alistair wanted him to cry; sometimes he wanted Dean to scream but always, always he wanted him to beg. Sometimes he wanted Dean to beg for him to stop, sometimes to beg for more. It was all part of the same game.

There was no water in Hell. No stringy river, no moisture gathering in rock walls, no tears, no spit, no sweat, no piss. The only liquid that seemed to maintain its form in Hell was blood. Thick and rich and covering every surface in sight. Hell wasn't black and dark as one would guess. Hell was red and brightly lit, bringing every flaw to the forefront, allowing for nothing to be hidden in the shadows.

When Alistair wanted to see someone drown, he used blood. Dean's blood, the blood of other souls, sometimes even his own. The coppery taste of it in his mouth was something that Dean would never forget. He was broken, but he never got the taste for it.

Sometimes Dean would wake, whole once more and once more strapped to the rack and there would be another soul over him. Another soul, trapped in the same nightmare, helpless just like him, body cut and sliced in just the right places to make blood gush and flood over Dean's face. He couldn't breath, he couldn't swallow, he couldn't escape the flow as it soaked him to the point that its presence was the only thing that he was aware. And then Alistair would make him scream, just to see his mouth open and be filled with another person's life. Sometimes Dean was at the bottom; sometimes he was at the top. He feared either position.

It didn't take Dean long to discovered that you can drown quicker in blood than in water.

.................

Sam pushed the Impala's breaks to the floor as soon as he spotted Ruiz' pickup truck. Good thing his brother always kept the damn car in such pristine form, or Sam would've just skidded off the road.

Sam couldn't see anyone around, which didn't exactly mean that there wasn't anyone around. After a quick check of the full clip inside his Taurus 9mm, Sam tucked it into the back of his jeans waistband and exited the car.

The truck's engine was already cold and the doors were locked, which meant that they had been gone for some time and, wherever they were heading, wasn't in plain sight of the car.

Sam walked around the driver's side and looked in to the truck's bed. It was empty and dirty but, fortunately for him, no puddles of blood to tell him that Dean was already dead.

The surrounding area didn't appear to have seen much movement, at least not recently. It was a good half an hour from the gas station where Dean had been taken, on the southern outskirts of Cleveland, but with the inclement weather, Sam figured there wouldn't be many hikers or families strolling about. And yet, there were plenty of fresh marks on the ground. Heavy footprints, scuffle marks, drag marks and even a spot near the truck's rear where a body seemed to have been dumped.

Sam followed the mess of tracks to the tree line and beyond. There were signs of struggle by one of the trees, broken branches and kicked lose dirt. Dropping to one knee to get a closer look, the younger Winchester studied the disturbed terrain carefully.

The glint of white metal resting against the otherwise green and brown floor caught his attention and Sam picked up an empty bullet case. A 9mm copper jacket casing. The metal was still brand new and shiny, not corroded by the elements at all, which meant that, whichever gun had fired that bullet, had done so recently.

A shiver skittered through Sam's body as he looked around, telling himself that he was looking for the bullet and not his brother's dead body. The tree to the left of him had a fresh hole about knee high, splinters gushing out of it like nature's blood.

Sam took out his pocketknife and dug around the hole, feeling when the tip of the blade struck metal. Scrunching around, the hidden bullet came out with a pop. There were no signs of blood on what was left of the bullet, but then again, there wasn't much left for Sam to be sure that the twisted piece of metal in his palm hadn't claimed his brother's life on its path to the tree.

Sam squeezed the mangled bullet in his palm, feeling the jagged edges dig in to his skin. He had to believe that Tigermman and his men wanted something from Dean, something that made them go to an awful lot of trouble to get his brother. They wouldn't just bring him to the middle of the woods and shoot him.

Something white caught Sam's attention and he pushed a couple of broken branches aside, hesitant as he worked, fearing that the last piece of wood removed would reveal a dead body. But there was no body, only clothes.

Someone had done a sloppy job of hiding a ripped shirt, some shorts, pants and shoes. At first glance, Sam didn't even registered the items as belonging to Dean. Dean didn't wear stripped shirts even when they were working a job and were forced to wear the cheap suits that they had bought. He refused to even consider the thought of wearing them, saying that white stripped shirts made him think of the Dalton's in Lucky Luke and if he was gonna be anybody in that comic book, he was gonna be the cowboy.

There wasn't even a point in telling Dean that the Dalton's wore yellow and black prison clothes and not white.

The realization that he was staring at Dean Smith's clothes sent a chill down Sam's spine. Because before, it could be a coincidence that Ruiz' truck happened to be abandoned in the middle of nowhere; before, there could've been a thousand different motives for that bullet to be there. But now... now Sam could no longer deny it. "Dean?"

A pause, clothes clenched in his hands, every small stain of red making Sam's vision float and swim in unshed tears. "DEAN!"

Sam's shout was met with nothing but silence.

..................

Tigermman was getting bored.

The pathetic excuse for a man hanging in front of him had stopped squirming a few seconds ago. When his chest stopped moving, the bag had been removed from his head and the pink mix of water, spit and blood inside it had been disposed of. They had more water, if the need for it arose later on.

Dean wasn't breathing, but that was to be expected. Most of the 'interrogators' that Tigermman had met in his line of business would take it only as far as the brink of unconsciousness and then allow the prisoner a breath. That wasn't as effective as his way.

Tigermman motioned to the redhead to approach and she complied eagerly, grabbing the small case that sat at her feet.

Prior to her husband's death, she'd worked as a nurse. A shapeshifter, wearing her skin, had killed her husband some five years ago. The creature had waited for her to come home and made her watch every minute of the deed, powerless, as the thing wearing her face hacked away, bleeding her husband dry. After that, she had just lost it.

The redhead was giving a hungry, almost feral smile at the thought of finally being allowed to lay her hands on the prisoner. Ever since they had taken him from the gas station, she'd been eyeing him like a candy, a treat to be savored and devoured and now...

Squinting in disgust, Tigermman was watching her work, and though he knew very little about first aid, he was pretty sure that licking and biting the prisoner's lips was not included the normal mouth-to-mouth procedure. "We need him breathing, Isabel... get your kicks later."

The prisoner was turning an ugly shade of purple and Tigermman still hadn't gotten his answers. Isabel threw him a contemptuous and defiant look, but still obeyed, one hand going to Dean's neck to check his pulse.

Giving mouth-to-mouth to a person hanging upside down was kind of tricky, but this wasn't Isabel's first time. She grabbed a handful of Dean's hair and pulled his head back to an angle that looked humanly impossible. Using her other hand to pinch his nose closed, Isabel licked her lips in an unconscious gesture, took a deep breath and covered Dean's mouth with her own.

It was impossible for Tigermman to know if she was just french kissing the guy or actually doing her job. Then, three breathes later, Dean coughed and spit and started breathing on his own.

Isabel seemed disappointed with that, but, after making sure that he would keep on breathing, she picked her case of medical supplies and backed away.

Tigermman looked around, searching for the remaining members of his group. Someone was missing.

Pepe was close by, carefully watching his sister-in-law actions, a hint of jealousy in his dark eyes. When his brother had been killed by the shapeshifter, he had wasted no time in stepping up the plate and keeping Isabel warm at night. It didn't matter much if her mind was working properly or not.

Moe, his to-do man, was a wuss to the point that Tigermman often wondered why he even kept the man in his service. He put on a front, but Tigermman knew how much the younger man stressed over things like this. Moe was also a junky and that reason alone made him very handy to have around. To secure his next fix, Moe would do pretty much anything he was ordered to. A nice fellow to have nearby when the time came for someone to take the fall.

Moe had excused himself ten minutes ago. Tigermman knew exactly what he was doing.

Tom, the fourth element of his team, was standing on the side, efficient, cold, watching the events taking place. It was the first time that Tigermman brought him along, but the man didn't seem at all disturbed by Tigermman's choices for answers-achievement. Leaning on the shade of a tree, the black man was the picture of calmness, paced and regular puffs of white smoke coming from his mouth and nose as he enjoyed one more cigar.

It had been Tom's wife who'd told them about Dean's 'activities' in Hell. Well, not exactly Tom's wife, but the demon that had been ridding her at the time. None of them could believe their ears as the filthy thing spat out love and admiration for the man who'd ensured that demons would be free to walk the earth.

Dean Winchester. Calling him a man was somewhat of a favor.

Tigermman's source had called his attention to the Winchester's a couple of months ago, pointing out all the weird shit that kept happening around those boys. Warning him that, if no one lifted a finger, the world would come to an end faster than anyone could guess. And that it was up to him to prevent it.

He had dismissed the scrawny little man at first. Gordon had been a capable hunter and a sharp hound, and Tigermman had ignored him too when he first approached him with ideas about the end of the world and Sam Winchester's involvement in it all. His army buddy, and Tigermman had still told him to take a walk.

There was no way he was gonna give any credit to the stranger wearing a trench coat that had come out of no where to warn him. Until the stranger bowed his head and showed him the wings.

When Dean had mentioned an angel, it wasn't the angel part that Tigermman hadn't believe. It wasn't the angel's involvement that he had found so amusing. It was the simple fact that a lousy piece of scum like Dean, who wasn't even worth the presence of one of those heavenly beings, would expect them to believe that he'd been given the special attention that he was boasting about.

No, that sort of attention was reserved for men like him, righteous men who could be entrusted with the fate of Mankind.

Now, Tigermman had no doubt that there were angels out there and that one of them had given him a task -a mission- of stopping this fool from destroying the whole world.

And he intended to fulfill that mission.

"Let's see if he's more open to discussion now."

........................

Dean spit a mouthful of water, gagging at the sudden reintroduction of oxygen in to his life. It was like his lungs had forgotten what it felt like to be filled with air, from the way they were burning and aching.

Dean coughed and sputtered, gasping to ease the passage of air through his bruised throat. His nose throbbed with each cough, turning the pressure inside his sinuses to almost blinding levels. His lips felt swollen, with that lingering tingling sensation he always got after being kissed. The 'whys' of him feeling that after drowning was not something that Dean wanted to dwell on just yet.

On the other hand, it really was true what they said about the brain being able to cope with only one major painful stimulus at a time. Almost drowning had done wonders for Dean's broken leg.

He looked down, which was up for the rest of the world, (except for bats, he guessed), and crossed his eyes, trying to focus on something. The sky was impossibly blue, cut on occasion by the fluffiest of white clouds. Maybe it was the lack of oxygen in his brain, or maybe it was shock setting in, but Dean figured that it was possibly the most beautiful sky that he had ever seen. A Simpsons' kind of sky.

The second his favorite TV show came to mind, Dean could not stop the theme music from playing in an endless loop inside his head. Which made hearing what Pepe was telling him a bit difficult.

The Mexican's face moved closer, "Just say the...." the words started to fade, slowly being replaced by the continuous dum dum ta ta dummdum dum ta ta TATATA of the Simpson's intro.

Pepe seemed to guess that he wasn't being able to grab his audience's full attention.

Stopping nauseatingly close to Dean's face, Pepe grabbed Dean's hair in one meaty palm and twisted, forcing Dean to look at him, leaning in until his stubble-covered chin and fetid breath were just inches from Dean's nose. Dean tried to keep his gag reflex in check because otherwise he was going to hurl.

"Look at me when I talk to you, boy!"

No letting him be, then.

"Which word do you prefer?" Dean finally asked, his voice sounding higher and wrong as he tried to talk through the pain and the rush of blood to his head. "I got asshole and fuckwad, all up for gra-…oof!"

Pepe still hadn't tired of using him as a punching bag. Dean would've snorted at the idea of him hanging like a punching bag AND being used as one, but the dizzying round-and-round-and-round motion that Pepe's hit had sent him in, was kind of making him nauseous.

Turns out that throwing up when you're hanging upside down is twice as nasty as the regular thing. Short of his stomach lining, Dean had nothing in his stomach to expel but bile and the water he had swallowed, but still his cramping stomach tried its best to spit out a whole three-course meal.

The world dimmed around him and Dean briefly wondered why the night was setting in so fast. He loved that shade of sky. He wanted that shade to be the last thing he saw before dying.

There had been no blue sky to see the last time he'd died, just an ugly ceiling and two uglier and huge hellhounds…

"Wake up!" Pepe shouted, punctuating his words with another sharp slap. Always learning, he had grabbed Dean's head before this time, not wanting to repeat the mad swirl that had send the man in to unconsciousness.

"The questions remain the same, Dean," Tiger finally spoke, nearing Dean with care, not wanting to step on the mess that he had made on the ground beneath him. "Tell me everything that you know about the demons' plans for the apocalypse, tell me how to stop it, and I will kill you quickly."

Dean blinked. His eyeballs hurt from forcing his eyes to look at things from an uncomfortable angle. When Tiger was standing close enough, Dean spat on him, aiming for the face but contenting himself with hitting the man's shirt. "Screw you!"

Tiger looked at the sliding glob of spit and blood on his shirt. He grabbed Dean by his hair, pulling so tightly that half of the wet hairs gripped in his hand came loose. He rubbed Dean's face on the mess he had made until his shirt could pass for clean.

"This is me being nice, Dean," he hissed on the other man's ear, ignoring the pained and gagging look on Dean's face. "You keep on pushing and you won't like not-nice me."

Dean laughed, a raspy sound that hurt both his throat and his sanity. "You brag about… knowing where I spent my summer," he said, trying hard to control his breathing but failing. "You don't know shit!... Try to imagine… being given as a plaything… to creatures that hate everything and… everyone in this Universe, but actually manage to hate you… more than anything else… Try to imagine a place where you can… not die, where days just merge… all in to one big endless string of pain and… humiliation," Dean whispered, his voice losing its strength underneath the memories and the sheer weight of what he was saying. It was more than he had ever been able to tell Sam… maybe being upside down really did help him clear his head…

Dean closed his eyes. He was losing it and he knew it. "Imagine all that and then tell me if… it isn't funny when you open your mouth to threaten me with… any of your pathetic, sadistic… playground tricks."  
The other man's only reaction was to let go of Dean's hair, disgustingly wiping his hand on his pants. When he'd deemed his hands clean enough, Tiger pulled another bag from his pocket. "You see… for all that you, all I can hear is a man that has met his limitations and would do anything not to be pushed to that point again," he said, making a show of opening the bag and putting his hand inside to expand it. "What I hear is a man that's been broken and badly glued back together… a man that will break easily again when pushed the right way."

Uriel's words echoed in Dean's memory, saying almost the exact same thing when, not that long ago, the angels had been hunting Anna. Both times they had been right. Only now it wasn't even a matter of breaking; he had already told Tiger what he'd asked for, the truth. It wasn't Dean's fault that the man hadn't liked the answers he gave.

"What more do you want to know?" Dean asked, his teeth distorting the words through all the chattering that had snuck up on him. "I already told you about the angel… I told you what he told me."

"That you're gonna save us all by stopping the apocalypse, the same one that you helped start?" Tiger said in a mocking tone. In a lightning fast move that made Dean jerk back involuntary, Tiger grabbed his face, large, manicured fingers that smelled of gunpowder and oil, closing over Dean's broken lips. Tiger's mouth brushed against Dean's ear, carefully facing away from the other hunters.

"You see, an angel talked to me too, only mine said a couple of different things," he whispered, his words now only for Dean's ears. "He told me about the seals, about how many are broken already… and he told me all about the prophecy… all about how the same man that starts it needs to be the same man to end it."

Dean's green eyes grew impossibly large on his face, realization dropping like a cannon ball inside his mind. He tried to talk, fight back, but Tiger's fingers close more tightly around his face, preventing him from doing anything more than moan.

"He told me all about your brother's place as the leader of the demons' army and the danger we are all in. He told me that, while they can deal with Sam, it is you that I should concern myself with, that you sold yourself downstairs to the highest bidder like some common street whore… he told me all about the burn on your shoulder and that the one who rode you out of Hell was the one putting it there, branding you as his bitch for all to know."

Dean's answer was muffled by his sealed lips, coming out as nothing more than desperate sounds. His eyes searched the other hunters, pleading them to realize what was happening, to get a clue on what was really going on here and just how delusional and insane their boss really was. They didn't mind his silent communication, too busy snickering and enjoying the show.

The mark on his shoulder was a sign of ownership? Even Castiel would find the humor in that, given the lengths he'd already endured to get Dean to do anything he wanted.

"So, you see, I already know your part in this," Tiger went on, "but if you don't start yapping all the vile things that you've been doing to get those seals broken... if you don't start telling me just who the evil sons of bitches are that you've been renting your sorry ass to and how I stop them… I'll just ask your brother when I see him."

Dean felt impotent rage boil at his core at the mention of Sam. Beneath Tiger's fingers, he released a rabid snarl so loud Tiger's grip faltered. It was just enough, and Dean parted his lips, teeth grabbing flesh and biting down, as hard as he could.

Dean had managed to get out of Hell without acquiring a taste for blood, but now, for a couple of seconds, Tiger's blood in his mouth was the sweetest thing he'd ever savored.

Tiger howled in pain, his finger trapped in Dean's teeth, blood flowing from between Dean's lips. Blind with rage, Tiger threw a punch to the first place in Dean's body that he could reach.

Dean gasped, out of breath, as Tiger's fist hit his throat, involuntarily releasing the bitten finger. Tiger stumbled away, holding his bleeding hand, fighting to regain control over the pain and his growing anger. He lost.

Wheeling around on his prisoner, Tiger pulled the gun from his waistband, cocking the trigger in the same fluent movement. "You shitface mother fucker!"

Dean met the black barrel in front of his face with the calmness of a man who had nothing more to lose.

"Go ahead... you kill me and you might as well kill yourself… you, everyone of those fuckers behind you, and… the whole wide world as you're at it," Dean said, spitting out blood that, for once, wasn't his.

He had a pretty good hunch that the rest of Tiger's goons weren't in on the information that had been whispered in his ear and he would bet that these were not a bunch that liked to be tricked. "Tell them what the angel told you... about me, about the prophecy… because you know… there's a 50-50 chance that I might be the one to bring on the apocalypse… as it is of me being the only who can stop it from happening."

Tiger froze, not daring to turn around and see the reactions in the others faces.

Mustache was first to understand what Dean was implying. "What's he talking about, man? You didn't tell us anything about no angels or prophecies!"

"He's lying," Tiger said, gun never wavering from Dean's face. "His playing with your minds, just like every other demon we've met does… you of all people should know that, Tom."

Tom was unconvinced. "The only facts that I have are that my wife is dead and what the bastard ridding her said about having met this Winchester guy in Hell! All the rest of this stuff was fed to us by you and your mysterious contact… So, now you're seeing angels too? Fuck this, man!... For all I know, he could be telling the truth and you're just two crazy motherfuckers!"

Tiger stilled and glared at Dean accusingly. Suddenly, he shifted his gun away and fired.

Tom looked in surprise at the red hole in his shirt, a quick butterfly pattern growing in alarming speed down his chest. He was dead even before his body hit the ground.

"What the hell?!" Pepe shouted, looking in confusion between his boss and the dead man on the floor. "Usted es loco! Tom… Tom es morto – Yu lo han matado, coño! Por qué?"  
Tigermman watched quietly as Ruiz grew from confused, to angry, to vengeful. He had no trouble ending a partnership that had lasted for over ten years, with a bullet between Ruiz's wrathful eyes.

He had no time to explain his point of view to those who would never understand it. He was doing God's work here. He could do no wrong.

Isabel's shrill scream filled the air, quickly followed by a third gunshot.

The silence that followed was filled with silent screams and broken promises.

Dean barely had time to register that the first gunshot hadn't been aimed at him before three other bodies lay dead on the chilly ground beneath the bridge. "What the fu-"

Pepe had landed right under him, feet twisted awkwardly, eyes open and unseeing, third eye black and angry looking in between the two brown ones. Nearer to the trees, Mustache's cigarette was still lit in between his slack lips, blood seeping sluggishly from the ugly looking hole in his chest. And Red-Hair… Red-Hair's throat was gone, ripped open by the point blank shot.

"This is all your fault, you know?" Tiger said, gun right back where it had started, pointing at Dean's head. "They didn't have to die, but you started filling their heads with doubts and I promised… I promised the angel that I would not fail in my task... my task, not theirs. They were not called to the mission like I was."

Dean tried to swallow but his dry mouth couldn't come up with anything for him to push past his throat. There was nothing more terrifying than a crazy man on a mission. A mission from God, apparently.

Whoever had gotten in touch with Tiger clearly had different ideas about Dean's usefulness to Heaven. Uriel, apparently, wasn't alone in his distaste for the Winchesters or in his willingness of putting them out of their misery.

"You were fooled, man" Dean tried to reason, straining his neck and forcing his eyes to focus on Tiger's face rather than the gun holding hand. "Who ever talked to you didn't give you all the facts… he's just using you."

Tiger chuckled without a trace of humor. "It was an angel… they don't go around tricking people and telling lies," he said, a look of wonder and awe in his face. "It was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen, with wings of pure light and its voice… nothing you say will convince me that that being was anything but an emissary of the Lord."

Dean let his neck hang lose, exhausted from the forced position. Sam had been in awe of the angels too, until he met Uriel. Nothing like a big ol'asshole to get all that fan-girling out of the way.

"Not all of them can be trusted, man… and a couple are most certainly not… emissaries of the Lord… they're just as confused and lost as the rest of us."

"And all of a sudden, the demon's boy-toy is an expert in angels… just say your prays to whichever god you put your faith in and prepare to meet your fate, Dean Winchester."

Dean closed his eyes, exhausted. There was no convincing Tiger to give up now. The man had just shot his whole team, just because he believed that he was doing the right thing and they didn't. Wars had started for less. Beliefs were always a dangerous, messy and bloody thing.

There was no point in hoping for divine intervention on this one either. If no angel had arrived to rescue him until now, Dean doubted that any would be hiding in the bushes, just waiting to make some dramatic entrance. Sam would be looking for him too, but they were out in the middle of nowhere and Dean's ass didn't have a GPS on it for tracking.

When the shot rang out, Dean wondered why it hadn't hurt at all.

......................

The best way that his father had come up with to teach Sam how to follow a track was to dump him in the middle of a forest and let him fend for himself, find his way back alone just by tracking John's footprints and clues. He had been eleven and Dean fifteen. It had been a complete disaster.

Sam had gotten utterly lost and ended up almost dying in that forest and Dean, who was supposed to have stayed in bed nursing his mono-induced fever of 103, had ended up in the forest, at night, tracking Sam. John Winchester was not impressed with his younger son's tracking skills and even less impressed with Dean's willingness to shelter and protect his brother from life. The fact that they had both ended up in the hospital robbed John of the lecture that he had no doubt prepared for the both of them. Instead, it was John getting the dressing down from the doctor assigned to their cases. Sam hadn't been around to listen when it happened, but he was later told that it had been epic.

Sam's tracking skills still sucked though. But, fortunately for him, these guys were no John Winchester and he certainly wasn't a scrawny eleven year old anymore.

After some scouting he was able to discern about five sets of shoe prints. Three were wearing army boots, two were wearing regular shoes, one of them possibly a woman's', given the small size of the print. One of the army boots' prints had left a mark so deeply indented on the ground that Sam figured that it had too belong to either a really, really fat guy or someone carrying an extra weight… like a body.

Those set of tracks eased up a couple of yards ahead, after a disarrayed area of leaves and branches where the extra weight being carried had actually been dumped. If Sam crossed his eyes and looked really hard, he could even see a handprint, faintly marked on the ground, where the dumped person had most likely pushed to get up. Where Dean had most likely pushed to get up.

From there on, there was one more set of imprints to track, the unmistakably marks of bare feet on the loose dirt. These could only belong to his brother.

Sam shuddered at the thought of Dean, without the protection of clothes and footwear, strutting ahead through the foliage and elements. He was going to kill these hunters… slowly… messily… permanently.

After a while, the ground became progressively more uneven and the rocks became excessively more abundant, with less and less soft dirt in between. Less dirt meant less prints, and less prints meant less signs to spot. Back tracking became a necessity as each print or broken branch got further and further apart and the trail just got harder and harder to follow. Panic started rising up in Sam's chest at the rapidly vanishing signs, his link to his brother growing thinner and thinner. Confidence waning at the prospect of not being able to find his brother left Sam sweating in the cooling air, breathing harder, fear coiling in his gut.

The loud sound of a gun going off broke the silence of the forest like a heavy stone breaking the quiet surface of a lake, waves of repercussions and disturbance rippling and expanding until everything in their path was changed.

The sound hadn't come from anywhere near the track that Sam had been following. His trail was leading him to higher ground, but the shot had clearly came from bellow.

Sam knew that he had been following the right track. It took him longer, but with his brother's unmistakable footprints to follow, Sam knew that he was heading in the right direction. He also knew that Dean had something to do with that gunshot.

By the time the second shot was heard, Sam could no longer tell which was running faster: his feet or his heart.

..................

In his life, Dean had already been shot more times than he cared to list. But, much like sex, the first time was the one that you never forget.

He'd been maybe sixteen at the time, close to seventeen, and his first time had been an accident. Dad had said for him to go right, so that they could circle the beast from both sides, and Dean had simply lost track of the number of turns he'd made around the bigger trees and had ended up standing directly in the line of fire between John and the black dog that they'd been hunting at the time.

He had been shot in the ass. By his father.

If it weren't for the guilt and shame present in John's face every time he looked at his oldest for the next couple of weeks, Dean would've written that one off as one of the funniest wounds he'd ever gotten. Still hurt like a bitch, though.

Now, he couldn't feel that same sort of hot and wet pain as he had felt then and every other time when he'd been shot. Dean couldn't tell if that was really good, or really, really bad.

Dean opened his eyes, vision blurry and unfocused as he tried to check his body for new holes. He couldn't see any.

Tiger, on the other hand, had lost his face. And not in that fancy, oriental-honor way. His face was literally a crater.

"I can think of a couple ways you can say thank you," the BottleRed, the DEAD BottleRed offered saucily, the smoking gun dropping to the ground. Nearing the confused, hanging man a grin slid hungrily across her face. "I found your lips extremely tasty before… maybe we can expand the menu to other… meatier parts."

If the gaping wound in the woman's throat wasn't clue enough, the quickly spreading blackness that suddenly took over her green eyes was a dead give away… no pun intended.

"Why should I thank you, skank?" Dean spat, hating the fact that, when her hands reached for his face, he could do nothing to get away.

"Besides the fact that I just saved your life, you mean?"

Dean refused to rise to her bait. It was bad enough that she was right about the saving his ass bit, he wasn't about to commend her for that.

"Well, they did warn me that you were an ungrateful little bitch," the demon went on. She seemed about to say more, but something got her attention somewhere in the woods behind them. She looked back at the hunter and smiled, a grotesque snarl on her lips that looked more ugly than the hole in her throat. "Lilith sends her regards," she whispered. Before Dean could understand what was happening, her hands were gripping his cheeks tight and the demon's mouth was on his, pushing her tongue inside.

And then she was gone, black smoke escaping the mouth that had just kissed him and BottleRed was back to dead, falling in a crumpled heap on top of Pepe.

Dean did a quick body count, contorting his body as far a he could hold the pain without screaming out. There weren't enough bodies... there was one missing. He couldn't remember which on, but his gut was telling him that the body count was one short.

The sound of running feet coming from the tree line distracted Dean's line of though before he could remember who was missing. The last thought to pass through Dean's mind before his body gave out and the world faded away yet again was that he'd just wasted his chance to get away.

...................

 

Sam had to give his brain a couple of minutes to process what his eyes were seeing.

Every second of the time it had taken him to reach the source of the gunshots, Sam had spent it running possible scenarios in his head, preparing himself to react to whatever he would face there.

The possibilities were endless.

Sam pictured finding his brother pissed, but safe and sound, standing victorious over the dead bodies of Tigermman and his men. He quickly dismissed that, not because he didn't believed it could be true -given half the chance, Dean would be able to handle himself just fine-, but because the image he was picturing inside his head was too similar to a classic painting that he had seen in one of Jessica's art books. In that image the one standing victorious was a bare-breasted lady waving a French flag… and that was just too disturbing.

Besides, he had to be pragmatic about this. Those guys had not spent the afternoon sipping tea with Dean and those were gunshots that he'd heard.

Which led Sam to the opposite side of the specter, wherein he could see himself arriving to find only the remains Dean's dead body, riddled with bullets.

Sam reconsidered the topless lady painting scenario. At least in that one, the good guys were still standing.

However, the scene he came upon after arriving at the small clearing wasn't one that would have ever crossed his mind.

There were at least three bodies on the ground, dead bodies, if the guy with no face was anything to go by, and smack dab in the middle of it all were a red haired woman and Dean, suspended upside down. They were trapped in a kiss that would've reminded him of the Spiderman movie of it weren't for the fact that his brother was butt naked.

Sam forced himself to move. He had heard four gunshots, and yet he could see only three bodies. Had the redhead saved his brother, killing all the others? There were at least two guns on the ground, that Sam could see, but no way to know which had killed whom and who had done the killing. And the red hair was the only one still standing.

The only woman that Bobby had mentioned was the one who had been married to Ruiz's late dead brother, the one who had joined him in the hunter's life style.

Maybe she and Dean already knew each other from before... maybe they had hooked up sometime between there and then? Either way, she seemed awfully familiar with his brother now, a fact that Sam might've snickered at were it not for the awkward position his brother was in, or for the fact that Dean's hands were cuffed together and he looked a bit south of willing.

Gaining speed to close the distance between himself and his brother, Sam knew that whatever had taken place here, he was not about to risk the redhead going all Fatal Attraction on his brother, killing him after making out while Sam stood there and watched.

He was just at the edge of the tree line when the woman threw her head back and a column of black smoke exploded from her mouth and throat. A demon.

What the hell was a demon doing near his brother when he'd been taken by mere hunters? Had they gotten their facts wrong?

Sam looked around, trying to sense the presence of any more demons in the area. It was something that had less to do with the demon blood in him and more to do with the life he'd led, with the number of times that a feeling had saved his and Dean's lives. Sam felt alone.

The place was plunged in to such silence that Sam had no trouble hearing the soft moan that escaped Dean's mouth right before his eyes closed and his hanging body went limp.

Sam gave caution a wide berth and hurried to Dean's side. His brother was a mess. "Dean?"

His hands, trapped together by a short length of metallic chain, hang loosely and relax, a warped ballerina pose that looked perversely done on purpose. Dean's right leg hung forward, bent and stiff, the flesh around the knee, swollen purple and black, standing like a flag on the otherwise pale skin.

The other leg was viciously lashed to a rope dangling from the bridge and it didn't look any better. Sam didn't even have to touch it to know that it was broken, and if the dead guys on the ground had done what Sam imagined they had, he had a pretty good idea of exactly how Dean's leg had become broken in the first place.

Careful not to step on the two bodies lying underneath Dean, Sam placed two fingers on his brother's neck. Sam prayed for a beat, a strong push of blood pumping inside Dean, a sign that he was alive and Sam hadn't arrive too late. "Come Dean… don't go all lazy prick on me now."

The soft beat against his fingertips was more gentle and rushed than Sam would've wonted, but beggars can't be choosers and his brother's heart was at least still pumping. "That's it! Now you just need to wake up… come on buddy, wake up… please."

Sam was being ignored. It was as if Dean had sensed that it was all over and had given himself permission to check out.

Sam looked at his brother's slack expression and knew that Dean was anything but relaxed or resting. He had to get Dean on the ground and away from the elements. The day had grown steadily chillier and Dean's skin felt like ice to the touch.

Unlike the rest of his body, Dean's hair and face were wet, not sweat-wet, but actually soaking wet. Sam gave a quick look around, searching for a water source, but found none. Sam could feel the chills wracking his brother's body and for a minute, Sam was very glad that the hunters were already dead.

Remembering Bobby's comments about the condition Tigermman's victims were often found, Sam shuddered. Dean had come too close to become one of them.  
Sam wasted a couple of seconds making sure that the dead bodies were actually dead before pulling the guy with the bullet between his eyes and the woman without throat out of the way, so that he could more easily reach Dean.

Even with the couple of inches that he had on regular humans, there was no way that Sam could reach the rope around Dean's ankle to cut him free. Supporting Dean's head and upper body against his chest, one arm keeping him securely against his own body, Sam looked up to where the other end of the rope was secured. The last thing on Sam's mind was to leave Dean there again and go all the way up to the bridge to reach that rope. He needed a closer and faster solution.

Sam took the gun from his waistband and aimed for the rope at a safe distance from Dean's foot. It was hard as hell to hit a thin rope against the bright blue sky, but he could make that shot. Granted, Dean was the sharp shooter of the two of them, but Sam could hit a freaking rope if that was what it took to get Dean away from there.

"Smm?"

Though weak, the unexpected sound of his brother's voice startled Sam. It came at the precise moment when all of his concentration was sighted down the barrel of his gun and his finger was squeezing the trigger. Nearly losing his hold on his brother, his aim was thrown; the shot went wide, missing the rope by miles.

Never one to do things the easy way, of course Dean chose that exact moment, when there was no way Sam could ease his body to the ground without hurting him, to wake up. After getting a firmer grip on his injured brother, Sam took a determined breath, mentally preparing himself for the added weight. The second shot was a bulls-eye and the rope snapped with a sulking recoil and tear that sent the twine bouncing wildly up into the air.

Though prepared, the sudden release of Dean's full weight fell crashing into Sam's arms with enough force to unbalance him, sending both of them crashing to the ground. Recovering quickly, Sam somehow managed to catch himself on one knee, softening Dean's descent to the rocky soil. Still, Sam felt when the pain hit his brother with force enough to stop his breathing.

"Hey, Dean… Hey! Man! Listen to me…," Sam said placing a steadying hand on his brother's chest. "You have to breath, ok? Just relax and let the air in… breathe for me, will you?"

Dean didn't even try. Probably didn't even understood. His body, however, got the clue and drew in air enough to feed Dean's starving lungs after a couple more seconds.

"That's it… in and out," Sam coaxed, wondering when something so easy had become such a difficult art for the both of them. Air was finding trouble in getting inside Sam's lungs as well.

The minute Dean's brain made the turn from offline to semi-functioning, Sam could see a different kind of panic spreading across his brother's red rimmed eyes, panic that had nothing to do with pain or shock.

Dean's hands grabbed his jacket, calling Sam' attention.

Sam placed his free hand over Dean's, grabbing the cold fingers and holding the feeble grasp steady, trying to keep his brother in the land of the conscious by sheer force alone. "What, Dean? What is it?"

"Not 'nuf bodies, Sammy," Dean rasped, his soft voice ticklish against Sam's neck. "There's… not 'nuf bodies."

Sam frowned. What the hell was that supposed to mean?

He glanced at the four dead bodies, unmoving, slowly starting to rot on the ground. The one with the third eye was an older version of the driver's license picture that Sam had pulled out from DMV - Ruiz.

The redhead had to be his sister-in-law; Tigermman he knew from the pictures he'd managed to dig up and the third man was a complete stranger, one that Sam figured to be part of the team.

Truth was, he was acting on few facts and even less solid information. Sam had just gotten a clue that might lead to his brother's whereabouts and acted without actually thinking things through. He had no idea how many hunters he would be facing, he had no idea if the bodies now littering the ground accounted for all of Tigermman's men, and he had no idea what that demon's part had been in all of this, or why it had hauled tail the minute it had caught Sam's scent in the air.

A certain sense of pride and gratification filled Sam's chest despite his best effort to keep it at bay. A demon had actually run away from him.

Sam knew that deep down, that sense of pride and self-confidence were also the culprits for his lack of thinking his actions thoroughly and in his hastiness and impulsive behavior. He had used his mind to send more demons to Hell in the last few months than he could even count and Alistair… Alistair had been just the first of all those nasty sons of bitches whose existence he would end once and for all.

Knowing that 'just humans' had taken his brother, translated as a small threat to Sam now. The new and better Sam. The Sam that made small fry demons run away when they saw him coming.

Dean was still mumbling incoherent words, still trying to warn Sam about something. Sam could feel the tremors wreaking havoc on his brother's body. Having experienced broken bones too, and he knew exactly just how painful any muscle movement was.

Sam shrugged off his jacket and wrapped it around Dean's shoulders. It wasn't much, but it would have to do until he could get him to a hospital. There was no way he would even try to deal with that broken leg on his own.

He just had to find a way to get Dean all the way to the car and come up with a really good excuse for his brother's condition by the time they arrived there.

......................

For some reason, Moe was never allowed to carry a gun. For all the jobs that he'd worked with Peter, the older man had never let him even near a loaded weapon, even though he said time and time again that he trusted his little brother. He said that he just didn't want Moe with that extra stress on his shoulders.

Moe figured that the real reason for it was still clinging to the inside walls of the syringe he always kept in his pocket.

He wasn't an addict, not really. Moe Tigermman and his brother Peter had lived hard lives, harder than most by his account. Peter had found his comfort in the Army, killing people and being good at it. Moe hadn't qualified for that -partial mental disability, they had said- and so Moe had to turn for other means to forget what they had done to their baby brother, Steve.

Moe didn't like to think about Steve, or the way his green eyes had turned glassy so fast, or the way his lips turned blue right before he started to jerk around like a fish out of the water until he succumbed and moved no more. No matter how many times he and Peter tried to explain that it had been just a silly game, no one had ever believed them.

Heroin made Moe forget about that, most of the times anyway. This guy, Dean Winchester, with his big round eyes, reminded him of Steve and Moe hadn't liked that, not one bit.

It hadn't been too bad, in fact he'd been enjoying himself plenty until Peter closed Dean's head inside the bag of water. One look in to the same green eyes, turning glassy and dead and Steve's voice had started booming inside Moe's head, yelling, begging him to stop. Moe had disappeared after that, racing to his best friend to seek comfort. It wasn't like Peter didn't know about it… the occasional hit made Moe think better, be better. Peter knew this and didn't mind it one bit.

The sound of gunshots had cut through Moe's drugged haze slowly, reminding him that he had to get back to the others, that he had to be there for his big brother as Peter had been there for him his whole life.

Now, if he had been allowed to carry a gun, it would've been easy to just stay in his hideout and shoot those two Winchester freaks.

The one that they had strung from the bridge was already loose and the taller one, the one that Peter had told them to stay away from, he was getting ready to leave now.

Moe scrubbed his head hard, fist banging on his temple to wake up his brain. His last dose had already kicked in, but it wasn't providing him with any reasonable solutions for his problem.

Peter was dead. Even from where he stood Moe could see the familiar shape of his last living family, slumped on the ground like a discarded and holy blanket. Something broke inside Moe and his eyes stung with loss and anger.

The Winchester demon had killed them all. Moe had left them for just a couple of minutes and the very beast that they were trying to stop, had killed them all.

The bigger Winchester was busy as a bee now, rummaging around the clearing and the bodies, gathering long pieces of wood and taking Ruiz' shoes and Peter's pants, like they were nothing more than mannequins on a shop's window. The damn filth was pillaging through the dead without bating a eye.

A part of Moe wanted nothing more than to race to his brother's corpse and, taking the gun from his cold hands, take out his revenge on the men who had done this. However, another part of him knew that he would be dead even before he could reach Peter.

Peter was better than him and still had ended up dead.

His brother had warned him about the Winchesters, about their impure ways and their betrayal of the human race. He warned him about staying clear of Sam Winchester, because he was not their bone to pick. Dean, on the other hand… Moe owed it to his brother to set things right and finish what Peter had started and failed to finish.

Miguel and Isabel would thank him too. He would be a hero and Steve would stop laughing at him inside his head all the time.

...................

Sam was a pretty strong guy. He usually tried not to show it off or take advantage of it, but Sam knew that he could pull his own weight just fine. And if Dean had been a tiny little thing at half his size and a half his weight, Sam would've had no trouble in just hauling his brother up and racing them to the car.

As it was, Dean was only a couple of inches shorter than him, and not enough pounds lighter, so Sam had resorted to half carrying, half coercing Dean to walk. Or stumble along, whichever way you chose to see it.

Sam had taken a couple of minutes more at the bridge to get Dean some shoes and pants, wasting no grief over the fact that one of the dead men would be left wearing only his boxers. Sam ended up having to slice the material of the pants in order to ease them over the swelling flesh of Dean's legs. Rage boiled again as Sam touched the too warm patch of skin on the otherwise chilled leg of his brother. Sam hoped now that there were vultures in the area - that was no less than these monster's deserved.

But even with the benefit of shoes on his feet -even if they were a size to big- and the added comfort and warmth of the borrowed clothing –even if they too were many sizes too large and Sam had to use his own belt to keep them from falling down again-, their progress was painfully slow.

The two tree branches that Sam had tied alongside side Dean's broken leg, serving as a makeshift and poor excuse of a splint, were exactly that… a poor excuse that hardly served its purposed. And Dean's other leg –Sam shuddered just to think of how much it was costing his brother to actually use that busted knee to propel himself forward.

Positioning himself at Dean's left side, Sam took full advantage of their height difference. Leaving Dean bound at the wrists to make carrying him easier, he pulled his brother's arms around his neck, like a forced hug, and held him by the belt loops, effectively preventing the broken leg from even touching the ground.

Not that Dean was all actually there to find the position ridiculous or the slow walk painful. Practically delirious, he kept whispering half words and nonsensical sentences, muttering about angels and demons, and beetles' eyes and missing bodies.

During their painful progression, Sam gave up on making heads or tails of Dean's constant rambling. Instead, he was just grateful that the sounds coming from his brother's mouth were only illogical words and not actual screams of pain.

Like the one he'd gave when Sam had first tried to pull him up. It was a sound that Sam had never heard before coming from his brother… it was a sound that he would give anything to never hear again.

Sam was torn between the desire to urge his brother on to greater speed in order to get him to a hospital sooner, and the constant reminder that Dean was simply too beat up and exhausted to move any faster.

At least he wasn't shivering anymore. Which wasn't necessarily good and certainly didn't by any means indicate that Dean had grown warmer. No, judging by the way his skin felt, cold and clammy, Sam figured that it just meant that their time was growing short and that they had to move faster.

The younger Winchester almost lost his balance when all of Dean's weight that he'd been carrying, suddenly became dead weight, tipping them both to the side. "Dean?"

Not even a flutter of eyes this time.

Sam had no other choice. Returning the gun that he'd kept in hand so far, Sam grabbed Dean with both hands and knelt down, carefully removing Dean's bound arms from around his neck. Then, he pulled them over his right shoulder, grabbing Dean's wrists with his right hand and lifting his body up. Dean ended up looking like a sack of potatoes, draped across Sam's shoulders and with his wounded legs secured tightly by Sam's left arm.

Sam grunted as he took that first step with all the added weight, but managed to push forward at a much quicker pace than what they had been doing so far once he got the jest of it. A mile or so and they would reach safety.

When, twenty minutes later, soaked in sweat and with trembling arms and legs, thinking about nothing more than the comfortable seats of the Impala and breaking a few traffic laws to get Dean some medical attention, Sam was not prepared to meet a stringy man with crazy, twitchy, animal eyes and a shotgun pointed right at them.

Sam finally understood exactly what Dean was saying about there not being enough bodies at the bridge and beetles' eyes.

They'd just found the missing one.

......................

Peter had told him about the angel. Moe had never seen him, but he believed his brother's word. After all, they'd seen plenty of demons since the devil's gates were opened, so why not see an angel or two?

He'd been disappointed that the angel had been a man, though. Peter had described him as an everyday-Joe with a 1930's look about him, in between the trench coat and the mysterious comings and goings.

Moe had been sure that angels would all be beautiful women. He wasn't all that sure of he even wanted to go to Heaven if, between Jesus, the prophets, the apostles and now the angels too, he would be surrounded by nothing but guys.

He had taken the electric gizmo from his brother's pocket early in the day. Peter had warned him that the thing wasn't for him to play, but Moe liked to watch the red dot move around the screen. There had been two dots at first, one for each Winchester, he had explained.

One of the red dots was now frozen still in the place Peter had kept the phone he'd taken from the prisoner, the other one, Sam's red dot, was moving slowly through the forest, heading straight to where Miguel had left his truck.

Moe had wondered why the angel would use something so human and earthly to track the Winchesters, but Peter had seemed pleased with the offer, saying that it made his job a lot easier.

It made things easy for Moe now too. All he had to do was follow the red dots and get his revenge. It had been no trouble at all to move faster than the Winchesters and cut ahead of them. He even knew where Ruiz kept his spare shotgun.

.........................

"Drop him!"

Sam took in the man in front of them. His eyes were red rimmed and slightly unfocused, a nervous twitch in the left one that dragged the man's face in to an ugly snarl. The hands holding the gun weren't that much better, knuckles too white, fingers too shaky. From the fresh needle tracks that he could see under the man's rolled up left shirtsleeve, Sam guessed that his jittery manners were more of the chemical persuasion than a nervous one.

There were beads of sweat all over the man's flushed face, which, along with the man's heavy panting, had Sam guessing that he'd probably run all the way from the bridge to cut ahead of them.

"Just take it easy, man," Sam tried, his voice as smoothing and unthreatening as possible.

Sam wasn't all that sure that the gunshot that kicked up dirt too near his foot was really meant as a warning or if the guy had just missed his shot.

"You take it easy," the man hissed, barrel looking back at Sam's chest. "I said drop him!"

It was actually a good thing that this guy wanted Sam to let go of Dean. With his brother draped around his shoulders and taking away his ability to use either hand, Sam was severely limited in his options. With Dean safely on the ground and away from the crazy line of fire...

"Ok... OK," Sam quickly said, carefully lowering Dean and positioning his brother against the nearest tree. Dean's mouth was slack in unconsciousness, his eyes sunken in a too pale face. Sam did not have time to deal with this guy.

"Now... step away from him," the man order, gun swinging left as he motioned Sam where he should go.

Born of years of hunting, Sam's move was lightning fast. In one smooth motion he was stepping away from his brother and turning, pulling the gun in an arcing motion and thumbing the safety. Now, he stood, feet planted, the weapon now aiming at the man's head.

"Now," Sam spoke calmly, "think very carefully about what I'm going to ask you... do you really want to do this?"

The stand off lasted only a couple of seconds.

"You can't shoot me," the man said, a sleazy smile curling the corners of his mouth. "Not if you're planning on driving him anywhere… and he's not looking so hot."

Sam didn't spare even a quick glance to his brother's prone form. He knew exactly how bad Dean's condition was and he could hear the labor in his breathing even from where he stood. "What the hell's that supposed to mean? Because from where I'm standing, it sure looks like I can shoot you fine," Sam said, calling the man's bluff.

"I buried the distributor caps," the smaller man said, flashing a toothy grin. "Both cars… you ain't going no where unless I say so."

Sam looked at the truck and the Impala, two dark figures looming just at a short distance, each holding a promise of salvation for Dean's battered body.

The guy was already waiting for them when they got there, he would have had plenty of time to do what he was saying and, no matter how much as he wanted to, Sam couldn't risk calling the man's bluff and shoot him. If there was even a small chance that he had actually rendered both cars useless, Sam needed to know where those caps were.

"Drop the gun," the guy demanded.

"Ok… you win, man," Sam said, slowly lowering his gun and putting it on the ground. "What do you want from us?"

.......................

Moe felt like jumping up and down, like celebrating high and hard. He could feel the power of the heroin cursing through his veins, making him sharper and stronger. He'd done it!

So many times his brother had warned him about how powerful and dangerous the Winchesters were and now here he was, simple Moe, with both of them at his mercy. And it had been so simple, so easy that he couldn't even understand what all the fuss was about.

The feeling of accomplishment and victory that came with it was more inebriant and powerful than any drug he had ever tried before.

Now, he just needed to finish what Peter had started and kill Dean Winchester. Maybe even throw in Sam's death as a bonus, just to help the angels a little bit more. Yes… they had only asked for one, but with the two of them in his sights, Moe could impressed the angel and gain his good favors, like his brother had.

Moe took a second pair of handcuffs from his jacket and tossed them to the bigger Winchester. "Put those on."

"Look man, let's just talk about this a second," Sam tried to reason, easily catching the cuffs with one hand. "There's some sort of misunderstanding here and I'm sure th-"

"Shut up!" Moe shouted. There were too many people talking at the same time. Steve, begging him to stop, Peter, urging him to go on, the angel he had never met telling him to squeeze the trigger... and this guy, talking, talking, talking. "Just shut the hell up and put those on."

........................

There was no way Sam was going to put the cuffs around his wrists. Even now, unarmed, with the other guy holding the gun on him, the younger Winchester still had the advantage. The minute that he allowed himself to be trapped like that, they would be on equal grounds.

Sam thought that he might try and take advantage of this guy's already unbalanced psyche, push just hard enough to get him to talk and not so hard that he or Dean end up dead. But finding the right balance would be a tricky game of give and take, something for which Sam had no time.

Quickly, Sam dropped the cuffs on the ground and, before the guy could squeeze a single shot, Sam flicked his hand and sent him flying backward. The impact with a tree sent the air rushing from the man's lungs.

Shotgun lost as soon as his back collided painfully with the hard timber, the look of pure terror that the guy gave Sam would've been enough for him to reconsider his choices. But Sam had more important things on his mind at the moment.

"Where is it?"

The guy was praying. The words were rushed and mumbled, but Sam could understand enough of them to realize that the guy was actually praying. To God. To be saved, to be delivered.

From Sam.

Something twisted inside Sam, anger and annoyance at always being mistaken for the bad guy, even when the real bad guy had just spent his afternoon torturing his brother. Sam raised his right hand, finger clenched upwards like a claw.

There was no demonic presence inside this man, just plenty of confusion and fear. But anger and rage denied sound judgment and Sam searched, probing the praying man until he found something else; his soul. Then, he was holding it in his grasp and squeezing.

The man screamed.

"Oh God! Oh God! Please… we did everything You asked us," the man mumbled, over and over again, face contorted in pain and snot leaking from his nose and mingling with his tears. "Help me!"

Sam stopped for a second, shocked. A few months ago, the idea of anyone doing anything because 'God had told them to', was either ridiculous or pronouncement of something nasty hiding behind divine hocus-pocus. Now… now, not so much.

"What are you talking about?"

The man sobbed, taking a deep breath when Sam eased on the pressure keeping him trapped.

"The angel… the angel warned us about you," he rushed the words out of his mouth, like he feared that some of them would escape before he had time to speak them. "But I didn't listen… Peter said th- my brother warned me… and I didn't listen."

This guy was Tigermman's brother? And an angel? Sam tried to keep the surprised look out of his face. First a demon and now an angel? What the hell had these guys stumbled upon?

"What did this angel looked like?" Sam asked gently, sensing that the man's head wasn't all there and that scaring him wouldn't get him the answers that he needed.

The man blinked, forcing tears out of the tips of his eyelashes. "The man in the trench coat… he told my brother that it was his job to stop the apocalypse… to stop you and your brother."

.....................

Moe was fucked. He'd screwed everything up, underestimated the power of Sam Winchester. And now Moe was going to die.

He could see the anger growing in the other man's eyes, could see the way they burned black like a demon's eyes. It was no trick of the dimming light... Sam Winchester was more demon than human, and if he hadn't ignored the angel's and Peter's warnings, Moe could've done something about it.

The mention of the angel in a trench coat had seemed to surprise Sam and Moe could feel the invisible fingers that were holding him prisoner, slacking enough to allow him movement.  
Moe did not waste his chance. He might be no match for a half-demon, but Dean was only human, for all they knew. Him Moe could do something about.

Dropping on all fours by the tree where he stood, Moe's fingers closed around his shotgun. He just needed one shot.

....................

Sam was watching the events unfold in slow motion.

The man's mentioned of a trench coat wearing angel had thrown him off. Sam was expecting maybe a description of a big black guy in a suit, but apparently, Uriel wasn't the only angel that wanted them dead.

The only trench coat wearing angel that Sam knew was Castiel, but that had to be just a coincidence, right? Maybe trench coats were something that angels in general favored, because it reminded them of wings or something.

There was no way that Castiel, Dean's angel Castiel, would be involved in an elaborate plan to take them out. Castiel liked Dean.

But Anna had told them that angels are unable to feel. Not love, not caring, not passion. Just obedience.

Castiel had been standing right in the next room when Alistair had been beating Dean bloody, a part of Sam pointed out. He'd done nothing until it was almost too late.

Castiel, who had been absent from their lives ever since the whole Alistair and Uriel fiasco, had done nothing about the fact that they had just wasted three weeks in the fight against Lilith, just so that Dean could play normal.

But Castiel would never betray Dean, Sam had to believe that.

Sam figured that he'd been lost in internal monologues for too long when he looked down and saw the man, not only free, but also with his hands around his shotgun, aiming straight at Dean.

Sam panicked.

His gun was still where he had dropped it before and he would never be fast enough to reach either the man or Dean. So Sam used the only weapon that he had available. His mind.

The shot went wild and the man looked confused for a few seconds, staring at the wisp of fog coming out from his mouth. The weather wasn't cold enough for him to see his breath like that, nor was his breath anything like that continuous string of whiteness that he was looking at.

He was dead the next second, eyes devoid of life, body devoid of soul.

And Sam fell to the ground, shaking in the realization of what he had just done.  
When he managed to gather himself enough to go to the man he had just killed and search his pockets, Sam found a set of handcuff keys, a GPS tracker and the two distributor caps.

Sam sighed in relief, realizing that the man had been lying about burring them. He grabbed the small keys and rushed back to Dean's side.

He was not expecting to see Dean's eyes opened and looking straight at him, a deep look of confusion in his brother's face. If the gunshot had roused Dean out of unconsciousness, then he had seen Sam…

"Dean, I-"

But Dean wasn't giving him a chance to explain himself. Exhausted beyond his limits, he'd just let his head fall to the side, eyes rolling backwards as the rush of adrenaline ran its course and unconsciousness claimed him once more.

 

 EPILOGUE

 

With a little bit of imagination, it wouldn't be too hard to picture the smoke coming out of Bobby's ears. The red face and the back and forth pacing didn't help either.

Sam steadied himself and prepared for the onslaught of choice words and insults that he knew he was about to get from the older man. Straightening his large shoulders, Sam drew to his full height and walked over to Bobby. He had dealt with John Winchester for 18 years. Bobby was a little lamb in comparison. Well... maybe a ferocious, sharp teethed lamb.

It wasn't like Sam had done anything wrong. Well, except for the small fact that he had kind of promised Bobby that he would wait for him and had then promptly done the opposite.

Bobby tended to hold a grudge over that kind of stuff, but Sam couldn't bring himself to feel guilty over what he'd done. One single decision microscopically different and Dean would be dead by now. Probably. Still hanging naked from that bridge, surely.

Sam shivered as that image came back to haunt him. He had to give credit to Dean for that one, but yeah, demons he could understand- people were just crazy. And vicious. And downright evil.

When Bobby moved to meet him, Sam almost flinched back, stopping himself at the last minute when he realized that the older man wasn't moving to attack him but to actually-

"Nice to see you too, Bobby" Sam whispered sincerely around the arms wrapped tightly around his shoulders, warmed by the large hand smoothing his back. The human contact felt good. After three weeks of living an isolated life that wasn't his own, followed by some of the most stressful hours of his life, touching a familiar body was like a long delayed 'welcome home'. A welcome home that would quickly turn very sour if Bobby even dreamt about how sappy Sam's thoughts were being.

When the older man finally let him go, Sam looked at Bobby's red face, close enough now to actually see the beads of sweat in his forehead and neck. At this distance, Sam was realizing that the color wasn't a result of boiling anger, but from worry and obvious exertion in the rush of getting to the hospital as fast as he could.

Bobby had been mad on the phone, there was no mistaking that. When Sam had called earlier, after handing Dean over to the ER doctors' care, he had been met by a very, very pissed off Bobby.

The older man had actually managed to arrive earlier, driving straight to Ruiz' home, the address having finally come through. When he had tried to call Sam to warn him of this, he was met with a pre-recorded message telling him that the number he was trying to call was out of reach. Bobby didn't have to take two guesses to know what Sam was doing.

After that, it was just a matter of sitting on his thumbs, like a damn prom date, waiting for the doorbell to ring. Or, in his case, his phone.

The news that Dean was alive had served to somewhat appease Bobby's wrath. It didn't escape his notice though, that Sam had said 'alive' and not 'alive and well'.

Still, Sam was in urgent need of someone to go over to the place where he'd found Dean and clean up the mess that they had left behind. He didn't care much for the bodies of the hunters, imagining that the cops would eventually figure that they'd killed each other for one reason or another. It was the clothes and rope with Dean's DNA on them that worried Sam. For two guys who were officially dead, it would be weird to have traces of one of them showing up out of the blue now. At a mass murder scene, no less.

Despite his anger, this was something that Bobby understood. He'd spend the last hours making sure that the Winchesters remained dead and buried as far as the authorities were aware.

"How's he doing?" Bobby asked removing the ever-present cap and using it to clean his sweaty, balding head.

Sam sighed. He felt like he had just done this dance not that long ago. In fact, he had done this dance so many times before that the whole thing was starting to lose its meaning. At least this time Dean hadn't needed a ventilator and there had been no night spent worried about possible brain damage from oxygen deprivation.

No, this time it had been just the broken bones, both in his leg and his nose, the pain-induced shock, the water in Dean's lungs, the hard to explain scrapes in awkward places and all the hand-shape bruises. Even Sam had flushed at the mention of those, knowing how hard his brother would've fought against those dumbasses and how personal and invasive they had to get to keep him subdued.

They weren't exactly wounds that were easy to explain and most of them looked exactly what they were: signs of torture. The kind of wounds that raise too many eyebrows and suspicions in hospital staff.

Upon arrival, the best Sam had come up with was a very feeble story about a dare gone wrong and nasty tumbles down a slope that ended in an even nastier and impromptu dive into the lake. The doctor had raised the expected eyebrow, not quite buying Sam's story, but one look at his despair and genuine worry and the medic had deemed him harmless and mostly innocent in whatever had happened to his patient. He had also declared them both idiots for pulling such a stunt, wisely advising Sam that the TV show was called Jackass for a good reason.

Sam was sure that, later, when they had time to see the rope burn on Dean's ankle and the cuff marks on his wrists, someone would no doubt call the cops. Heck, the finger marks alone would be enough reason for that. Sam planned to have his brother out of there long before that.

"They took him to surgery a couple of hours ago," Sam told Bobby. "Doctor figured that, if all goes as planned, his broken leg should heal up in no time and without any lingering limp. The right knee it's just a badly sprained ligament, so they're not ev-"

"Limp?" Bobby cut in, the concern clear in his face. Theirs were dangerous lives in which every hunt could be their last, but circumstances of work were so extreme that they expected to either live or die. Any thing in between, any permanent damage that left them alive and parading the results of their failure was not something that any hunter worth his salt faced lightly.  
"They said they could fix it… Dean's leg, because of the way it was broken, actually extended a couple of inches... He's gonna be pissed for not being awake to enjoy his brief time as the taller Winchester once again," Sam tried to joke. It came out flat and lifeless.

"What the hell happened out there?" Bobby asked in a whisper, watching as a couple of nurses walked by them in the corridor. "T'hell were you thinking going against five guys all by yourself?"

Sam nodded to the waiting room to their left. They didn't need any more ears listening to their conversation, especially one that involved five dead guys and supernatural beings. "I didn't kill them, Bobby."

Bobby's eyes clenched. Sam could tell that the older man didn't wanted to call him a liar flat out, but he was clearly not buying the crap he was peddling. "Sure didn't look like they died of old age, Sam."

With a sigh, Sam sat on one of the blue plastic chairs that adorned the depressing pale yellow room.  
"They were all dead when I got there, Bobby… I wouldn't have made a move on them otherwise," Sam lied, his eyes meeting the old man's, unflinching. "Tigermman, Ruiz and the black man were on the ground when I got to Dean. He was… I found him hanging upside down from that bridge. From the looks of things, they tied that rope to his leg and just… just threw him over."

Bobby cursed. He had figured as much when he saw the rope dangling from the bridge's frame. "What about the bodies of the woman and guy near the cars?"

"Never saw the man by the cars," Sam lied once more, the twisted truth leaving his mouth like it belonged there. It was bad enough that Dean might've seen what he had done to Tigermman's brother. He wasn't about to tell Bobby that he had literally killed a soul. "The woman was possessed… I saw the demon take off before I even got there."

Bobby's intake of air was cavernous as he landed on his ass on one of the chairs of the otherwise empty waiting room. The shock of learning that there'd been a demon involved wasn't as gut-wrenching as watching Sam so blatantly and calmly lie to him. Bobby had mention five bodies before and Sam hadn't even blinked. The three guys and possessed woman that he claimed to be already dead when Sam got there only made for four. It wasn't that hard of a math problem. Sam was lying through his teeth.

And there was the small fact that, search as he might, Bobby hadn't been able to figure how the guy by the truck had died. Unlike the others, there was no bullet wound anywhere on his body. No wounds at all. It was like the man had just decided to die and toppled over where he's stood.

"A demon?!" Bobby finally said, so low that he must've scratched his throat. "What was a demon doing with that bunch? What t'hell did they want with your brother anyway?"

It was a fair question. It was a question that Sam had expected from the older hunter, practical man that he was. Sam just wasn't sure how much of this whole mess he wanted to share with Bobby.

Bobby was family; there was no question in Sam's heart about that. But he was also an opinionated man who would act according to what he thought was right and not how Sam and Dean wanted him to act. The question was, how to explain to him just how involved he and Dean were in this whole apocalyptic stuff?

"I don't know… Dean was pretty much out of it when I got to him," Sam explained, which wasn't exactly a lie. All he'd learned he had heard from a man whom he supposedly never met or killed. "But it looked like that demon saved Dean… I just got there in time to collect the pieces."

"Why the heck would a demon help your brother?" Bobby asked. "They hate his guts."

Sam would love to know the answer to that question himself.

"Got this from Tigermman," he said, remembering the GPS receiver that he had in fact taken from one of the Tigermman brothers, just not the one Bobby was certainly thinking. He took the small device out of his jacket pocket. The screen was showing two static red dots, one in the outskirts of the city and the other right on top of the St. Vicent Charity Hospital. "What the hell?"

Bobby took a peek at the device in Sam's hand. "St. Vicent? Isn't that where we're at?"

Sam nodded as he got up, discreetly walking to the outside corridor and checking how safe they were in there. Other than hospital staff and a few patients walking around, the place was deserted of suspicious faces. On a hunch, Sam took his brand new cell phone from his pocket and walked to an opened window.

The view outside was to the hospital's back lot, some industrial trashcans and a few parked cars decorating the grey cement. Pulling his arm back, Sam threw the phone as far as he could, watching as it bounced on the far wall before falling to the ground in several pieces.

One of the red dots in the device in his hand moved an inch to the side before disappearing altogether. "The fuckers!"

Sam could feel the anger growing inside him. That phone, along with everything else that had been a part of their lives for the last several weeks, had been provided by Zachariah, Castiel's boss. Angels.

How could a simple group of hunters get their hands on a GPS tracker that was following his and, Sam could guess, Dean's cell phone, if the only beings that knew where Sam and Dean were had been angels?

"Sam?" Bobby called, coming behind the younger man.

"They had a tracker, Bobby." Sam said handing Bobby the device. "That's how they managed to finds us so easily." Running a hand through his hair, air blowing out of clenched jaws in exasperation, Sam realized quietly that Ruby was right after all. They had to beware of the damn angels.

Bobby was silent, slowly turning the device over in his hands, like the answers to his questions were somehow hidden in there. He had tried locating the brothers by using the GPS signal in their cell phones too, but all he had gotten was a pissy phone operator and a disconnected signal. "How? What for?"

Sam never got to answer that. An older man with wire glasses and a quickly receding hairline, dressed in light blue scrubs and a white coat walked toward them, stealing a look at the clipboard on his hands before looking up to meet their eyes. "Dean Medlocke's family?"

Both men jumped to attention, eyes glued to the doctor, trying to gather any information they could from the man's stance and mood only. The relaxed older man turned gentle eyes on them and smile. "Dean is going to be fine," he said, knowing that at this point the family probably wanted it short and simple. "He's being moved to recovery as we speak, but you can see him as soon as he get him set up, ok?"

Strangely enough, the news sent Sam's heart plunging to his feet, which was pretty much the reaction that he would've expected had the news been bad. However, the main difference between what he was feeling now and all the other times that he had indeed received bad news, was that now he couldn't care less where his heart was.

Dean was going to be ok and, as soon as Sam could determine just how much his brother had seen in that forest and as soon as he could explain himself to Dean, they too would be ok.

Sam would deal with the angels later.

......................

There was a child crying loudly somewhere in the distance, a continuous wail that would've grated on his nerves had it not been for the feelings of sadness and helplessness that the pitiful sound evoked in him. Dean opened his eyes lazily.

"Hello Dean," a slurring voice greeted him.

Dean recoiled when he recognized both the voice and the presence. "Alistair."

"I've been waiting to meet you for a very long time," the demon hisses as he moves closer, one hand trailing down the length of Dean's arm, past his clenched hand, mapping the flesh all the way to his thigh. His fingers feel cold, like the touch of a blade and Dean can't escape their touch.

The first time Alistair had come to him, it had been hot. It was always hot where he was, but that demon had burned with a particular hot blaze. He was hideous too, not this human version that Dean was looking at now.

There had been very little to resemble a human back there. The basics were there, but they looked wrong, displaced.

There were two eyes, cold and flickery, like quicksilver, pressed closer together than any human ever could have without being a Cyclops. There were hands, but there were too many hands, reaching too many different places at once, causing too much pain for it to be just ten digits.

And the mouth… mouth and neck were a single entity, like those of a snake, with teeth just as sharp and a forked tongue that never stopped talking. "We've all been waiting for you," it hissed at him now.

The last time Dean had seen Alistair he was wearing some poor undertaker's meat-suit with pale eyes and a blood smeared beard.

"You… you're dead," Dean whispered, panic growing like a balloon of rusty iron inside his chest when he realizes that he cannot move. The pain in his leg increases tenfold when Alistair's fingers move past skin and dig deep into his flesh.

The demon's voice is nothing but a wisp of air against Dean's ear. "You should know… nothing really stays dead, Dean."

The voice holds a smile in its tone but Dean's eyes are closed too tightly for him to actually see the smirk in the demon's lips.

"Oh, by the way," Alistair goes on, the intrusive touch inside Dean's leg twisting and expanding until Dean's no longer sure that his leg is even attached to his body anymore. "Lilith sends her regards."

Dean's gasping, but there's no air reaching his lungs. He opens his eyes in panic, consciousness threatening to seep away, and Alistair is no longer alone.

Uriel is smiling, standing right next to him. "I warned you, mud monkey… but you were just too stubborn to listen, weren't you?"

"Warned me about what?" Dean rasped out, his throat dry and sore. Where was he and why wasn't anyone coming to help him?

He couldn't move, he couldn't breath and Uriel was standing just as close as Alistair. Dean struggled against his own body, willing it to move, begging it to take him away from there.

That kid would not stop crying and Dean felt an immense urge to join him in his despair.

"Take it easy, Dean."

Finally, a familiar, safe voice. Dean opened his eyes and looked at the foot of the bed, the same bed where he was trapped by angels and demons on either side and looked at his brother. Sam looked bigger than ever, dark bangs of hair hiding his eyes from sight. He was smiling though, a comforting smile that never failed to lift Dean's spirits.

"Sam… Sammy, I can't move," Dean said, like that fact wasn't obvious from the way he was trapped between the two bodies.

Sam's smile never faltered as he extended his right hand. "It's ok… everything's gonna be ok."

The whole room was swallowed in a flash of bright light and in the back, Lilith laughed on, and on, and on…

..............

There was a child crying loudly somewhere in the distance, a continuous wail that would've grated on his nerves had it not been for the feelings of sadness and helplessness that the pitiful sound evoked in him. It sounded less like a child and more like the wind, running through the trees, trying to escape the inevitable.

"Dean... you must wake up."

Dean opened his eyes, the order impossible to disregard or ignore. He was sitting in the Impala, Castiel comfortably perched on the passenger seat. "Where am I?" Dean asked, confused. He couldn't help but look down and make sure that Alistair's finger wasn't still stuck inside his leg.

"This is your car," the angel said, sounding surprise that Dean hadn't realized that immediately.

"Funny," Dean snarled, leaning forward to look outside. He couldn't see a thing past the white fog. There was no way he was driving his baby in those conditions. "Where's Sam?"

The memory was as smoggy as the weather outside, but Dean could still remember the feeling of utter loss when he sensed, more than saw, another part of Sam's humanity, of Sam's soul, wasting away as he destroyed another soul. As Sam killed a human using his powers.

It had all been a dream, a pain induced hallucination, a distorted memory from all the times the demons had used his brother's face to torment him. Sam had assured him that his powers only worked on demons… Sam would not turn against his own kind so easily.

"You're only fooling yourself, Dean… this is, after all, your mind," Castiel cut in, easily responding to the words Dean had not dared to speak.

Castiel was right. The mist outside had grown more turbulent, a prelude to a storm. "Why didn't you tell me," Dean murmured, the sound barely a sound at all. He knew the angel would listen even if he only said it in his head. "Why didn't you warn me?"

"We didn't know. Things have been… uneasy amongst our contingent," the angel confessed, sounding weary.

"That why you didn't show your face the whole time me and Sam were playing Joe-normal?" Dean threw back, for the first time realizing that he had actually felt betrayed and alone to know that 'his' angel had abandoned him to his fate.

"I was under orders."

"Orders to hide from me?" Dean said, cringing when the words came out sounding infantile and petulant even to his ears.

"Orders to find those amidst my brethren whom Uriel managed to convince to disobey, those guilty of blasphemy and who turned against our Father's will… those who conspired against you once again."

Dean felt the angel's pain as if it were its own. He knew know that pain would eventually be his; there would be no escaping that. "Did you find him? Did you find the angel who set Tigermman up?"

"I did."

"What happened?" Dean asked, knowing the answer to his own question but needing to hear the words coming from Castiel's mouth.

"I did as I was ordered… I did what was necessary to assure the survival of all," the angel replied, crestfallen. "It is not obedience that troubles me… it is the fact that each brother and sister's death that is delivered by my hands feels like-"

"Like death itself for you too," Dean finished for him, realizing now that it was no longer a choice between killing or saving Sam. It was a choice between killing humanity by allowing Sam to go on his way to become whatever it was he was becoming or saving whatever was left of Dean's sanity. It was a choice between saving humanity or keeping his own.

Outside the Impala, the storm had turned everything black and tumultuous, wind blowing against the car's frame and threatening to turn it upside down. Inside, Dean was crying, tears falling like they belonged on his face.

"I don't really have a choice, do I? I never had a choice," Dean said softly, gazing at the angry rain outside. "Even Lilith is protecting me, making sure that I do my part, whatever that may be."

"There is always a choice, Dean," Castiel said confidently, his piercing blue eyes on Dean, even if the man refused to look at him. "But more often than not, it is not the choice that we'd wished for."

"And the demons?" Dean asked with unease.

"They know as little or less than us," Castiel confessed, honest in his humbleness.

Dean used one hand to wipe the tear tracks off his face, a gesture that was becoming too familiar for him. "I need you to promise me something," he said, finally turning to meet the angel's gaze. He didn't wait for Castiel's answer. Dean knew that the angel would not deny him this. "When the time comes, IF the time comes, after I… I don't want to die indoors ever again. Promise me that, however things come to happen, you will take me someplace where I can see the sun or the stars… anything but four walls and a ceiling over my head."

"Dean…"

"Promise me!" Dean said with more strength and power than he had ever used his whole life. If there was a single thing that he felt he could demand, this was it. He was tired of dying away from a breeze in his face, away from the warmth of the sun, away from the kiss of the rain. He wanted to be surrounded by life when his final time came.

Outside, the clouds started to collide with one another, thunder and lightning casting white stripes of light and noise that seemed to engulf the whole car and its occupants.

"It is promised," Castiel simply stated.

......................

There was a child crying loudly somewhere in the distance, a continuous wail that grated on his nerves. Sam clenched Dean's hand inside his and willed his brother to wake up. To just open his eyes and look at Sam.

One look and Sam was sure he would be able to tell how much damage to their relation the latest development in Sam's powers had caused.

Now that the worry about Dean's health and physical condition had been somewhat pacified, Sam had nothing else to think about other than to contemplate whether or not Dean had been coherent enough to realize what Sam had done in order to save him and, if indeed he had seen Sam kill that man, what the odds were of him not freaking out.

Sam sighed. He knew Dean would react badly to it. After the fit he threw at seeing Sam exorcise a demon with his mind, of course Dean would raise hell at seeing Sam do the same with a soul. Might even throw a couple of punches again.

In all honesty, the incident had left Sam a little rattled, as well. He had no idea that the added power of Ruby's blood would actually make him strong enough to pull a human soul out of its body, but truth was, some humans were just as bad as demons. And that one had hurt his brother. That one was ready to kill them both because an angel had told him to.

Sam wondered if this new side of his ability would work on a angel as well? Because Dean would never admit it himself, but he needed protection from both demons and angels now... and Sam was the only one standing between his brother and harm.

His gaze fell on the man sleeping on the hospital bed. Dean seemed troubled even in his sleep, brows pushed together in a pained expression. Sam looked at the IV hanging beside Dean's bed, checking if the painkiller was running as it should.

With his eyes closed and his nose scrunched up, like there was a particularly foul smell in the air, Dean too young. He looked fragile and breakable. Dean was fragile and he was so breakable that he had in fact been broken, Sam reminded himself. It was just that an alert and cocky Dean helped Sam forget about that sometimes.

Maybe it was another of his nightmares, the ones from which Dean woke up gasping with a silent scream trapped in his throat, the ones he denied and never talked about.

Sam didn't like to wait like this. Especially like this, when all he had to distract him was the sight of his brother unconscious twitching and choking on unchecked gasps, as he lay trapped in some nightmarish review of his life.

Taking advantage of his unconscious state, Sam placed his other hand over Dean's forehead, pushing away the usually spiky hair that had turned soft with the lack of grooming. Dean's face pushed unconsciously against the gesture, the openness and freedom that came with the absence of rational thought allowing him to seek the warmth and comfort of the gesture.

Seeing his brother beginning to stir awake, Sam quickly removed his hand from his face, self-conscious of the fact that this wasn't who he was. This wasn't who they were. He kept his other hand around Dean's. A small sign of rebellion against their self-imposed rules.

Dean opened his eyes lazily, taking in his surroundings like he was searching for something that wasn't there.

"Welcome back," Sam said with a smile as soon as Dean's gaze landed on him. "We're in the hospital... how're you feeling?"

Dean looked up, green eyes slowly focusing and becoming more and more alert. And there was the look Sam was searching for.

Sam had dedicated most of his adult life to reading Dean's eyes. Unlike the rest of him, which he could manipulate and force to do as he wanted, Dean's eyes were out of his control, always open, always showing even the things that Dean tried to hide.

There was no recrimination, there was no hate or even a flinch of uncertainty when Dean looked at Sam and lazily squeezed his hand back.

"I'm ok… you big girl," he said, untangling his hand from Sam's.

The smile was fake, but Sam didn't notice that.

"Good, 'cause your doctor has been giving me weird looks for the last half hour and I'm guessing that the cops will be here real soon," Sam said, one hand dialing the new disposable phone and the other already pushing away the bed clothes from Dean's bed. He let the phone ring once and snapped it closed, turning to get the wheelchair that had been strategically stashed in the room earlier.

Five seconds later, the fire alarm was blaring with all its might, drowning away the child's cries at last.

"Let's go… Bobby's waiting downstairs," Sam said, nimble fingers detaching electric leads and blood pressure cuff from his brother and carefully maneuvering Dean out of his bed.

Dean felt like he couldn't push a kitten away, the room spinning wildly sideways and backwards. He gripped Sam's arms tighter and bit his lips to stop himself from screaming in pain the second his leg went from comfortably numb to wrong!wrong!wrong!

"Just take it easy, Dean," Sam kept on whispering, "It's ok… everything's gonna be ok."

And if the words were meant to sooth him or Dean, neither knew. They weren't working, either way.

Like before, every hiss of pain that escaped Dean's clenched teeth felt like a slap on Sam's face. But they could not afford to spend any more time in there and, even if Sam would give his right nut to allow Dean the rest and healing that he needed and deserved, he knew that that rest and healing could no longer be in the hospital. They could not afford to be caught. Not now, of all times.

.........................

Two weeks later, just like the doctors had said, Dean was back on his feet. It still hurt to be up for long periods of time and it would take a while for that leg to be able to sustain any kind of physical strain, but he was up and moving the second it was able to support his weight. He would go stir-crazy if he had to stay trapped on Bobby's couch for one more day.

Two weeks later, Bobby knew where the boys had spent the three weeks prior to Dean's kidnap and why that had happen. The looks he kept giving Dean after that were the main reason why Dean wanted to escape his couch as soon as possible.

Two weeks later Sam was already itching to get back on the job and hunt Lilith. He never said that he has done with wasting time, but the feeling was there all the same.

The end

**Author's Note:**

> This has been a wonderful, wonderful ride. I very much enjoyed my time in DeanWhumpage land and I expect to be visiting again soon. To all my wonderful reviewers a big, bear hug. You guys are awesome and made me feel like I was writing for someone other than just myself.  
> To Jackfan2 a ginormous (Sam sized) thank you for everything that she contributed for this story.


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